The lights dimmed, a small plaque was illuminating the stage with the red letters, “ON AIR”. I know I am in for a treat: Welsh poet Dylan Thomas wrote Under Milk Wood, or A Play of Voices, as a radio play, and this set choice indicates the production will be a thoughtful application of Thomas’ voice. The sound designers are actually onstage, at the edge of the traverse, so the audience is conscious that every sound is indeed an act of theatrical illusion. During one moment, a metronome pulses while characters begin to exchange lines in perfect meter – the way that Thomas’ poetic and sensitive rhythm was lifted from the page and to the stage was charming.
Playful deception is the starting point for this play, as the first narrator (Bea Smalley) opens, inviting the audience to listen to the innermost thoughts and dreams of the townspeople of a small Welsh fishing town called Llareggub (which you only notice is “buggerall” backwards when you look at the programme). One by one, the characters enter, and we see snippets of their dreams: Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard relentlessly nags her two dead husbands; Captain Cat relives his precarious seafaring times; and Polly Garter pines for her dead lover. After these introductory snippets to the unconscious of our characters, the town awakens and we watch them go about their daily business, now with the knowledge of what hidden feelings motivate their actions.
It’s all rather chaotic. Not only are there twelve actors onstage but there are 28 characters in the whole play – it’s incredibly difficult to follow. Actors had to double up and identities were initially easily confused given that our introductions to the characters were through their fantasies (or nightmares) rather than reality. Yet when Mr Pugh has dreams of poisoning Mrs Pugh, and then in real life announces to his wife at dinner that the book he is reading is a guide on poisons, the moment of connection between the unconscious and conscious is such a sudden shock that it provokes a rich feeling of collaborative comedy – the audience is delighted to be in on the joke.
The entire ensemble rises to the challenge of Thomas’ convoluted script. As the stage is a strip on, with the audience on either side, you can only hone in on the interactions that are happening directly in front of you – it creates a unique and intimate viewing experience, as though the audience member, like Captain Cat, is peering through a window and watching the townspeople go about their lives.
Despite the largely mundane activities enacted, each character is entrancing. It is no easy feat to portray different characters within a few short moments, but each character has such a developed series of mannerisms, gait, and vocal inflection that you are gradually able to intuit when an actor has switched between characters.
Some notable moments were Lily Smalls, a young girl who bemoans her existence immediately upon waking, complaining with childish vanity into her mirror during an aside, before returning onstage with elegance and poise, truly presenting as a different person. This was an introduction to the theme of dual identities which continued throughout the production, and was mimicked by the dual roles actors inhabited. Magdalena Lacey-Hughes, for example, played both a 17year-old girl who has never been kissed but spends her afternoons drawing lipstick circles around her nipples, and Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard, who ceaselessly pesters the ghosts of her two dead husbands.
One moment, however, stole the show. Captain Cat, the blind sea captain who is tormented in his dreams by his drowned shipmates, dances with the ghost (or rather, a puppet) of his lost lover Rosie Probert. Until this scene, he has been an observer in the town, narrating what he sees through his window, but this change of emotional tempo is so gentle and calming that it is heartbreaking.
The production occasionally struggled to keep up with their ambitious sound and lighting concepts. Technical issues at the start of the show meant that lights came on rather than off, sometimes there was a clear delay in the sounds or lights, and we were sat suspended in the silent darkness waiting for something to happen. This only really hindered the performance at its opening, however, and first-night jitters can always be excused, especially when demanding effects are necessitated by the text itself.
Overall, the production’s risks tended to pay off: the most engaging set innovation was a small light projector, used to create a backdrop, but also tell shorter narratives of the play without adding in new cast members through clever shadowplay. The technicians were working constantly. At the end of the performance, when the townspeople were falling asleep onstage, I glimpsed the sound directors also slumped over the switch board – they had earned their rest.
In the final moments of the show, the overwhelming emotional response was tenderness. As all the characters danced around in circles at a celebratory town hall event, switching dance partners and involving the narrator, it was heartwarming to see these characters finally meet each other outside of their dream worlds. There was something homely in the dancing, with fiddles and even harps brought onstage, which left me half expecting the audience to get up and join.
Cartesian Production’s Under Milk Wood was a delicate and heartwarming showcase of ambitious creative talent in all departments; the chaos and lyricism of Dylan Thomas’s writing was brought to life with tangible affection for the stories of the residents of a quaint fishing town.
