Under Milk Wood
An omniscient narrator invites the audience to listen to the dreams and innermost thoughts of the inhabitants of the fictional small Welsh fishing town, Llareggub, (buggerall spelt backwards).
[1] In 1933, Thomas talked at length with his mentor and friend, Bert Trick,[2] about creating a play about a Welsh town: He read it to Nell and me in our bungalow at Caswell around the old Dover stove, with the paraffin lamps lit at night ... the story was then called Llareggub, which was a mythical village in South Wales, a typical village, with terraced houses with one ty bach to about five cottages and the various characters coming out and emptying the slops and exchanging greetings and so on; that was the germ of the idea which ... developed into Under Milk Wood.
[19] In September 1944, the Thomas family moved to a bungalow called Majoda on the cliffs outside New Quay, Cardiganshire (Ceredigion), Wales, and left in July the following year.
[23] Thomas' bawdy letter-poem from New Quay to T. W. Earp, written just days after moving into Majoda,[24] contains the name "No-good", anticipating Nogood Boyo of Under Milk Wood.
Thomas's wife, Caitlin, has described the year at Majoda as "one of the most important creative periods of his life...New Quay was just exactly his kind of background, with the ocean in front of him ... and a pub[25] where he felt at home in the evenings.
[30] The play's first producer, Douglas Cleverdon, agreed, noting that Thomas "wrote the first half within a few months; then his inspiration seemed to fail him when he left New Quay.
"[32] The writer and puppeteer, Walter Wilkinson, visited New Quay in 1947, and his essay on the town captures its character and atmosphere as Thomas would have found it two years earlier.
[36] The most important of these was Quite Early One Morning,[37] Thomas' description of a walk around New Quay, broadcast by the BBC in 1945, and described by Davies as a "veritable storehouse of phrases, rhythms and details later resurrected or modified for Under Milk Wood.
[42] Mrs Pritchard-Jones was constantly cleaning, recalled one of her neighbours, "a real matron-type, very strait-laced, house-proud, ran the house like a hospital ward.
"[43] In her book on New Quay, Mrs Pritchard-Jones' daughter notes that her mother had been a Queen's Nurse before her marriage and afterwards "devoted much of her time to cleaning and dusting our home ... sliding a small mat under our feet so we would not bring in any dirt from the road.
[52] The time-obsessed, "thin-vowelled laird", as Thomas described him,[53] New Quay's reclusive English aristocrat, Alastair Hugh Graham, lover of fish, fishing and cooking, and author of Twenty Different Ways of Cooking New Quay Mackerel,[54] is considered to be the inspiration for "Lord Cut-Glass … that lordly fish-head nibbler … in his fish-slimy kitchen ... [who] scampers from clock to clock".
[58] Other names and features from New Quay in the play include Maesgwyn farm [59] the Sailor's Home Arms,[60] the river Dewi,[61] the quarry,[62] the harbour,[63] Manchester House,[64] the hill of windows[65] and the Downs.
[70] FitzGibbon had come to a similar conclusion many years earlier, noting that Llareggub "resembles New Quay more closely [than Laugharne] and many of the characters derive from that seaside village in Cardiganshire..."[71] John Ackerman has also suggested that the story of the drowned village and graveyard of Llanina, that lay in the sea below Majoda, "is the literal truth that inspired the imaginative and poetic truth" of Under Milk Wood.
[84] The testimony from Prague, when taken with that of Burton about the meeting in the Café Royal in 1947, indicates that several of the characters of the play were already in place by the time Thomas had moved to the Boat House in Laugharne in May 1949: the organist, the two lovers who never met but wrote to each other, the baker with two wives, the blind narrator and the Voices.
The first known sighting of a script for the play was its first half, titled The Town that was Mad, which Thomas showed to the poet Allen Curnow in October 1949 at the Boat House.
"[91] The play's producer, Liz Reitell, locked Thomas in a room to continue work on the script, the last few lines of which were handed to the actors as they were preparing to go on stage.
"[108] Douglas Cleverdon has suggested that the topography of Llareggub "is based not so much on Laugharne, which lies on the mouth of an estuary, but rather on New Quay, a seaside town...with a steep street running down to the harbour.
An examination of the sketch has revealed some interesting features: Thomas uses the name of an actual New Quay resident, Dan Cherry Jones, for one of the people living in Cockle Street.
"[118] Llareggub's occupational profile as a town of seafarers, fishermen, cockle gatherers and farmers has also been examined through an analysis of the returns in the 1939 War Register for New Quay, Laugharne, Ferryside and Llansteffan.
[119] Thomas is reported to have commented that Under Milk Wood was developed in response to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, as a way of reasserting the evidence of beauty in the world.
and The Burning Baby[126] ("Death took hold of his sister's legs as she walked through the calf-high heather up the hill... She was to him as ugly as the sowfaced woman Llareggub who had taught him the terrors of the flesh.")
By the summer of 1952, the title was changed to Under Milk Wood because John Brinnin thought Llareggub Hill would be too thick and forbidding to attract American audiences.
Willy Nilly and his wife steam open a love letter from Mog Edwards to Myfanwy Price; he expresses fear that he may be in the poor house if his business does not improve.
A few months later, in January 1955, the play appeared in the French journal Les Lettres Nouvelles as Le Bois de Lait, translated by Roger Giroux, with two further instalments in February and March.
[147] Daniel Jones, the Welsh composer who was a lifelong friend of Thomas's (and his literary trustee), wrote the music; this was recorded separately, on 15 and 16 January, at Laugharne School.
[citation needed] The 1972 film adaptation, with Burton reprising his role, also featured Elizabeth Taylor, Peter O'Toole, Glynis Johns, Vivien Merchant and other well-known actors, including Ryan Davies as the "Second Voice".
Digital noise reduction technology allowed Burton's part to be incorporated unobtrusively into the new recording, which was intended to represent Welsh voices more realistically than the original.
[168] In 2009 and 2010 a translation in Dutch by the Belgian writer Hugo Claus was performed on stage by Jan Decleir and Koen De Sutter on a theatre tour in Belgium and the Netherlands (e.g. the Zeeland Late-Summer Festival, the Vooruit in Ghent, etc.).
[171] The BBC Formula 1 introduction to the 2011 Singapore Grand Prix featured extracts of the audio for their opening VT.[172] In 2012, the Sydney Theatre Company staged a production starring Jack Thompson as First Voice and Sandy Gore as Second Voice, with a cast including Bruce Spence, Paula Arundell, Drew Forsythe, Alan John, Drew Livingston and Helen Thomson.
[177] In October 2014, the BBC launched an interactive ebook entitled Dylan Thomas: The Road To Milk Wood, written by Jon Tregenna and Robin Moore.
