Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood invites us to laugh at ourselves – I wanted my music to do the same

The Guardian

12 hours ago

In October 1953, Dylan Thomas took part in a symposium on poetry and film in New York. A recording of the event captures the Welsh writer's speaking voice in what would be one of his last public appearances before his death 12 days later at the age of 39. Amid the pops, ticks and crackles of the tape, we hear Thomas on sparkling form, telling the audience about an experimental play he had been to see 'in a cellar or a sewer or somewhere', accompanied by the US playwright Arthur Miller. In the middle of the performance, he recounts, Miller turned to him and remarked, 'Good god, this is avant garde. In a moment the hero's going to take his clothes off.' Roars of laughter follow this anecdote, before questions turn to Thomas's radio play Under Milk Wood, which had enjoyed a number of public readings in New York City that year, billed as a 'new comedy'.
Under Milk Wood is quite a different sort of play to the avant garde production Miller and Thomas had attended. Set in the fictional Welsh town of Llareggub ('Bugger all' backwards), it documents the dreams, digressions and foibles of the town's inhabitants in a blaze of poetic beauty and vibrant satire. It is a 'play for voices', borne out of the world of the mid-20th-century BBC radio feature – a fluid, experimental genre in which narration, acting, song, verse, music and sound effects were mixed together often without the constraint of a dramatic plot. Thomas himself was a gifted radio actor and had taken part in a number of BBC radio features, including The Dark Tower by Louis MacNiece and In Parenthesis by David Jones. When Milk Wood was first broadcast in 1954 on the BBC's Third Programme, the cast was led by his friend and acting companion, Richard Burton.
I was only dimly aware of Thomas's radio play when I was first approached about adapting it. I knew that the script contained extensive passages of memorable narration and this, alone, was enough of a draw for me. The proposition – from Nova Music Opera, Presteigne festival and Spitalfields music festival – was to compose a music-theatre adaptation of Thomas's radio play in an abridged form combining narration, acting and singing, in the vein of Stravinsky's l'Histoire du Soldat. I was both curious and cautious. Since its first broadcast, Milk Wood has been through all sorts of transformations – from staged theatrical productions to feature films, an animated version, a ballet, a contemporary classical opera and even a jazz suite. The question of what it means to 'stage' a radio play has been debated vigorously. Then there is the challenge of setting Thomas's words to music, given that his language already possesses such a distinctive music, shape and rhythm of its own.
Exploring relationships between words and music has marked much of my work to date. I have created musical settings of poetry, fragments of prose and private letters by figures such as Rainer Maria Rilke, Don Paterson, Joseph Roth and Aubrey Beardsley. Setting words to music can be a minefield for composers. As Virginia Woolf remarked in her 1937 broadcast On Craftsmanship: 'Words, English words, are full of echoes, of memories, of associations – naturally. They have been out and about on people's lips, in their houses, in the streets, in the fields, for so many centuries.' Words are living entities, but composers attempt to capture them, to fix them in a foreign structure as a jeweller would a precious stone in a metal setting.
My first task was to cut 90 minutes of material down to just under an hour. I shrunk it by degrees until I arrived at a shortened version of Milk Wood that preserved Thomas's temporal arc stretching from dawn to dusk. Many of Llareggub's most notorious residents remain in my text: Captain Cat with his seafaring memories, Mr Pugh who studies a book titled Lives of the Great Poisoners as he prepares to murder his wife, Willy Nilly the postman who reads other people's letters, Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard and the ghosts of her two henpecked husbands, Polly Garter pursuing endless liaisons, Mr Waldo singing drunkenly in the pub, and the dead lovers who surface to haunt the living.
Scenes from Under Milk Wood is written for a small mixed instrumental ensemble and a cast of one narrator, two singers and two actors who perform multiple roles. Like a fox in a hen house, I've enjoyed running riot with the music, devising a score that includes atmospheric underscoring for narration and spoken poetry, lyrical and declamatory operatic singing, and my attempt at a kind of modern folksong. The hybrid form of the piece connects back to the experimental radio feature world that first gave rise to Milk Wood, and the decision by our director Harvey Evans to return the production to a semi-staged radio studio is therefore fitting. Our cast turn up in the mid-1950s for a live recording session and endeavour, with scripts in hand, to bring Thomas's eccentric characters to life, just as the original broadcasting group did over 70 years ago.
For today's audiences, the radio studio staging of Scenes from Under Milk Wood also provides an opportunity to be transported, in the same manner as the listeners of the 1954 broadcast, into what Evans describes as the 'living mosaic' of Llareggub. The music seeks to celebrate the comedic aspects of Thomas's loving and humorous portrait of human imperfection, bringing back into focus his subtle invitation to audiences to learn to laugh at themselves. For, as one famous jester in another age memorably put it, 'Foolery, sir, does walk about the orb like the sun, it shines everywhere'.
The world premiere of Scenes from Under Milk Wood is at Spitalfields festival, London, on 2 July. More about Ninfea Cruttewell-Reader here.