Under Milk Wood, National Theatre, review: Michael Sheen glows in Dylan Thomas’s madcap work
“To begin at the beginning”, runs the opening line of Dylan Thomas’s “play for voices”. At the onset of Under Milk Wood’s stage-life in May 1953, it was the tousled poet himself who voiced the narrator, and guided the audience in New York’s Poetry Center around the peculiar, fictional Welsh town of Llareggub.
A recording survives, but Thomas’s death that November meant it was Richard Burton whose smoky, seductive 1954 BBC radio recording has become identified with the work. Now Michael Sheen, another denizen of Port Talbot, takes on the role, re-opening the Olivier for the first time since Christmas in charismatic style, and conquers it with a fresh slant.
Director Lyndsey Turner’s conceit (using a supplementary script by Sian Owen) is that the eccentric but dozy locale – Llareggub, lest we forget, is “bugger all” backwards – is transposed to the confines of an old people’s care-home. The opening line now occurs some time in, after we’ve watched low-key goings-on and Zimmer-shuffling in the lounge. Arriving in the residents’ midst is the bearded figure of Sheen, shabby in contrast to his father, who is wearing his Sunday best. The old man, Richard Jenkins (Karl Johnson), is in a reverie with shades of dementia.
Brandishing a photo-album, Sheen’s character is on a mission to communicate, stimulate and (just a little) recriminate. As he jabs at old pictures, he implores his da to cast his mind back. Whereas the intimate mode of address – “You alone can hear the invisible starfall” – is usually an invitation to the audience, here it’s a filial imprecation, stripping away familiarity and stoking urgency. Sheen gropes for words, and new-mints his verbal prods; Thomas’s text sounds far from emptily declamatory, and its fragmented style acquires a new kind of inner logic.
As Sheen becomes more animated, painting the scene with his hands, those around him are drawn into the sensuous, madcap dream. We keep one foot in the here-and-now: suddenly, Michael Elwyn’s Mr Edwards is cooing devotion with Gaynor Morgan Rees’s Miss Price, and a care-worker pours milk as we’re introduced to “Ocky Milkman, emptying his churns into the Dewi river”. But then bells sound, the stage clears, and Johnson, becoming old Jenkins’s own father (Reverend Eli), delivers a rapt soliloquy; the past floods back, complete with old-world period dress.
This is a humbler affair than the 1995 staging in the Olivier, which boasted a cast of 23; here a company of 14 play in the same space, but in the round, to an audience capped, for the moment, at 500. Yet the austerity accentuates the lyrical richness; Thomas’s word-music cuts to the way our identities are bundled up communally with others and our past selves, the living and the dead co-mingled.
Amid the myriad theatrical-poetical vignettes, let’s hear it for Sian Phillips, who was in the 1972 film and nigh-breaks your heart as Polly Garter, warbling her love of “little Willy Wee who downed and died”. Here’s hoping that Under Milk Wood, too, is granted an afterlife beyond its short summer run.
Until July 24. Tickets: nationaltheatre.org.uk (returns only)