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It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black ..

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As some of you may know, today, the 13th of May, is INTERNATION DYLAN THOMAS DAY and around the world various activities have taken place to celebrate the great Welsh poet. I discovered thIs fact yesterday when I went along to Rönnells Antiquarian Bookshop to listen to a reading of UNDER MILK WOOD. Completely free of charge.

Rönnells is exactly how I want a bookshop to be. Piled high with wonderfully obscure books, it’s staffed by enthusiastic bibliophiles with an impressive level of arcane knowledge,
It’s a marvelous venue for smaller, more intimate gigs, poetry readings etc. I’ve seen concerts here by both James Yorkston and the Secondhand Orchestra and Welsh guitarist Gwenifer Raymond.

However I was apprehensive. Would anyone turn up? Does anyone in Sweden in 2026 know who Dylan Thomas was?

Would I be able to understand the poem in Swedish?

Would the translation capture the lyricism and the humour of the original?

I needn’t have worried about any of these things. The bookshop was completely packed. I coped quite well with the Swedish. And the seven readers who brought Llaregybb to life did a splendid job.

What an extraordinary gallery of characters Thomas created. Dai Bread, Organ Morgan, Polly Garter, Mr Willy Nilly, Nogood Boyo, Myfanwy Price etc etc Many of those names were rather tricky to translate.

This morning I discovered that UMW has been filmed twice.

A big Hollywood production in 1972 with Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor and Peter O’ Toole.

I got wondering whether this most Welsh of plays has ever been translated into the Welsh language. It has indeed. In 2015 a feature film was produced, with one version in Welsh and another in English.

A few questions for you.

Do have any small, bohemian, local venues in your hood for more esoteric events?

Would a reading of Dylan Tomas put bums on seats in 2026 or is he past his sell-by date?

Have any of you seen Under Milk Wood at a theatre, in a cinema or perhaps at a local art centre?

Call me a fuddy duddy. I’d far rather listen to UMW, as we did on Tuesday evening, without any visual aids and then let my imagination do all the work.

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Comments

  2. I was vaguely aware of the content of UMW – some of the best-known lines and some of the characters – and was pleasantly surprised to discover that Sky Arts was showing the National Theatre’s fairly recent staged version, starring Michael Sheen.

    Sadly, I was bored to tears and switched off within about 10 minutes that felt much longer. For some reason – I’m guessing this was down to the adaptation and not the original text – the first scenes were in a modern residential home where the elderly residents and staff chatted about nothing until an angry writer (Sheen) turned up, demanding to see his dementia-stricken dad. I found it staggeringly dull and meaningless. If a word of D. Thomas was spoken in the short bit that I watched, I must have missed it.

    It’s now put me off ever approaching UMW again, as I’ll just be thinking of a stage-full of elderly residents wasting their time and mine.

    • That really does sound like an abomination @captain-darling.

      A production that had no respect for the original text.

      I wanted to know more and found this review.

      https://boycottingtrends.blogspot.com/2021/06/theatre-review-under-milk-wood-national.html

      I wonder what Dylan Thomas would have made of it..

      Following a seductive selection of creamy crooner classics, a befuddled, pajama-clad Karl Johnson enters the sheet-covered stage; the appearance of nurses and residents soon locates us in a care home. And the stories, relationships, dreams and daily doings of the inhabitants of Llareggub become, in this account, a tale told by a son to make contact with his Alzheimer’s-afflicted Dad.

      Turner’s fluid production has an uncanny quality all its own. Part of that has to do with the suggestions of the multiple stories of the past that are present under a care home’s daily facade and quotidian chatter,

  3. I acted in Under Milk Wood when I was at school, was basically a one scene, couple of lines performance. I was wonderful, my darlings …

    Have visited the Boathouse in Laugharne and been to the City Lights bookstore in San Francisco which had DT connections. There is also a bar in Toronto called The Dylan, a kind of loose tribute I think (or was initially), been there once just after it opened and it was bit disorganised. I should try it again, maybe on my next visit.

  6. I’m very fond of this terrific George Martin 1988 recording in its double vinyl incarnation, resplendent in a gate-fold sleeve that contains a terrific illustrated booklet. Copies in fine condition can be bought on Discogs for around £15.

    UnderMilkWood_double LP

    A1 Main Theme
    Conductor, Music By – George Martin
    Guitar – Mark Knopfler
    A2 To Begin At The Beginning
    Performer – Anthony Hopkins

    B Guide Book: Less Than Five Hundred Souls…
    Performer – Alan Bennett

    C1 Song: Johnnie Crack And Flossie Snail
    Lyrics By – Dylan Thomas
    Music By – George Martin
    Vocals – Children Of Laugharne School, Freddie Jones

    C2 Song: Polly Garter – I Loved A Man
    Lyrics By – Dylan Thomas
    Music By – Elton John
    Vocals – Bonnie Tyler

    C3 Polly Garter Song – Reprise
    Performer – Bonnie Tyler

    C4 Song: Rosie Probert And Captain Cat – Love Duet
    Lyrics By – Dylan Thomas
    Music By – George Martin, Rod Edwards
    Performer – Freddie Jones, Mary Hopkin

    D1 Look, Says A Child To Her Mother…
    Performer – Anthony Hopkins

    D2 Song: Rev Eli Jenkins – Sunset Poem
    Directed By – Dr Haydn James
    Lyrics By – Dylan Thomas
    Music By – Troyte
    Vocals – Sir Geraint Evans, The London Welsh Male Voice Choir

    D3 Song: Mr Waldo – Come And Sweep My Chimbley
    Lyrics By – Dylan Thomas
    Music By – Andy Leek, George Martin
    Vocals – Tom Jones

    D4 Main Theme
    Conductor – George Martin

    The cast is terrific, with a huge number of Welsh performers, as you would hope and expect.

  9. I once* stayed a weekend in Laugharne because my tall pal did a gig in Hurst House and it was my birthday.

    I mostly remember spending the afternoon in Tenby and the audience watching as Mrs F and I were waltzing round the formal gardens, as Sir played ‘Wings on my Heels’, a track about ballroom dancing he wrote for Eddi Reader.

    At the time, Hurst House was co-owned between actor Neil Morrissey and our pal Matt, who I first met when he was a porter at Addenbrookes hospital. It went bust, twice, under their management then became the Corran Resort & Spa, and went bust again.

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-south-west-wales-11924381

    (*) I looked it up – 2nd March, 2002.

  11. I knew that Thomas worked for the BBC. this was very interesting.

    https://www.library.wales/discover-learn/digital-exhibitions/dylan-thomas-1/radio-broadcasts-scripts

    During the War, instead of joining the Army as a small tank, Dylan is employed by Strand Films to write documentary and propaganda film scripts for the Ministry of Information. His most celebrated propaganda film is ‘Our Country’, an illustration of Britain’s part in helping to win the War.

    Here’s one of the propaganda films he made. It certainly sounds like one of his works..

    There is a documentary about his propaganda work.

    The You Tube notes are worth a look….

    And what about Dylan’s politics? How did a man who leaned towards the left-wing of the political spectrum, and towards pacifism actively sell the government’s wartime propaganda message? The journey starts at the poet’s first home at Cwmdonkin Drive, Swansea where he wrote illuminating essays about the film industry for the school magazine.

    He was 25 years old by the time he went to work for the Ministry of Information and had already published five volumes of poetry, as well as scripting for the BBC. However, his love for film as a medium, as well as his need to support his family and keep the wolf from the door, meant he ended up working for Strand Films in Soho, and later on, Gryphon Films.

  12. After reading @jazzjet and @myoldman and their mentions of Stan Tracey’s UMW album, I wanted to know more.
    We are going to go slightly off-piste for a moment or two but I’m sure all the AW Jazzcats will not complain.

    This page had useful info about the original recording.

    https://ukjazznews.com/the-stan-tracey-quartet-jazz-suite-inspired-by-dylan-thomas-under-milk-wood-resteamed-lp-rec-1965/

    Recorded on 4 March (Wiki says 14th) 1965 at London’s Lansdowne Studios by Adrian Kerridge with Denis Preston as producer, and released on EMI’s Columbia, the album was a critical hit whose literary associations commanded respect at a time when jazz itself did not automatically do so. Heard now, with the pleasing gap between side A and side B restored, the album feels less of a tribute to Dylan Thomas’s rumbustious radio play – a recording of which Jackie Tracey owned – than to Stan Tracey’s genius as composer, pianist and bandleader.

    Harold Wilson was PM and Swinging London was the place to be.

    And this page provides a long and detailed account of Stan’s career.

    https://jaz.fandom.com/wiki/Stan_Tracey

    Tracey’s 1965 album (its full title is Jazz Suite inspired by Dylan Thomas’ “Under Milk Wood”) is one of the most celebrated jazz recordings made in the United Kingdom. Tracey was inspired to compose the suite by hearing the original 1953 BBC broadcast on an LP his wife Jackie had acquired. The track, “Starless and Bible Black”, a quote from the opening monologue, is probably the best demonstration of Wellins’ lyricism and the highlight of Tracey’s whole career. Such is the affection with which these pieces are held that Tracey has re-recorded them on several occasions, something that is unusual for British jazz musicians to do. Under Milk Wood was followed by Alice in Jazzland, an album for big band, the next year featuring many of his former Ted Heath colleagues. Later in the decade, Tracey made the arrangements for an Acker Bilk record, Blue Acker and his first album dedicated to Duke Ellington compositions (both recorded in 1968), in this case to commemorate Ellington’s 70th birthday the following year.

    In 2003 Tracey was the subject of a BBC Television documentary Godfather of British Jazz, a rare accolade nowadays for any jazz musician, let alone one from Britain.

    Tracey’s catalogue from the LP era is being reissued on ReSteamed Records.

    So far I haven’t found that documentary on line but this clip is wonderful.

    Here is a full-length doc.

    • That ‘Godfather of British Jazz’ documentary – the second of the clips you posted @Kaisfatdad – is wonderful. I particularly like the bit where Stan tells how he wrote the Under Milk Wood suite on the night bus home after his stints at Ronnie Scott’s, where he was supporting pianist to many of the visiting US stars – Ben Webster, Stan Getz, Sonny Rollins etc.

      • Yes indeed @jazzjet.

        I was fascinated to read about the documentary and then very chuffed to find it on YT. I look forward to watching it tonight.

        One think I’ve realised when reading about Stan is what an important role his wife, Jackie, played in getting his career back on the rails.

        https://www.theguardian.com/music/2009/sep/09/jackie-tracey-obituary

        This article is excellent too..

        https://www.theguardian.com/books/2002/mar/23/books

        Tracey’s six-and-a-half years as house pianist at Ronnie Scott’s was to be a turning point in a musical life that had professionally begun at 16, as an accordion player with the Entertainments National Service Association (Ensa) at the end of the second world war. He had fallen in love with an instrument in a shop at the end of his road, and his mother persuaded his father to buy it. At 14 he took his first jobs – factory work, as a Fleet Street messenger boy, and then in Ensa with the accordion.

        “I couldn’t play very well,” he says, but they were desperate. You more or less only had to be able to hold your instrument. We pretended to be a Gypsy accordion band, bandannas and bell-bottom trousers and all that. Then I was stationed in London at the Central Medical Establishment, where I met Bob Monkhouse, who became a good friend.” For his part, Monkhouse says: “I knew he was a musical genius in 1947. He could hear any melody once, and instantly play a dozen brilliant improvisations on it.”

        Tracey then joined the dance-band of Vic Ash, and came into close contact with the glamorous American jazz world they all aspired to join when the band toured the country in support of the swing star Cab Calloway.

        “He was a great entertainer but not a very pleasant man,” says Tracey.

        “Vic was supposed to meet him at 10 for a game of golf one day, and showed up at five past. Calloway was apoplectic. ‘It’s only five minutes,’ Vic said. Calloway asked him, ‘How would you like to hang by your dick for only five minutes?’ Some of those big stars were like that – they wanted you to jump through hoops. I came across it again sometimes when I was house pianist at Ronnie’s.”

        Tracey graduated from the accordion to the piano through a devotion to boogie-woogie, “which I thought was just total music then, better than anything”. Then he encountered Duke Ellington and Thelonious Monk, his two main influences.

        • One of the most difficult visiting musicians at Ronnie’s was Stan Getz. Ronnie Scott used to say he got a bad back through having to bend over backwards to meet Getz’s endless demands.

          • I remember hearing from somewhere that Getz always had one band member he treated as whipping boy in his earlier years.
            Another one with a reputation for nastiness was Jimmy Smith.

  13. I found a box set of LPs many years ago in a second hand shop – Richard Burton reading UMW. I think I’ve still got it, although I haven’t seen it for a while.
    I think this might be it (I haven’t listened all the way through…)

  14. His short stories are less known but absolutely terrific. I always make time for A Child’s Christmas in Wales over the holiday period. Just listen to this one though:

    • I am also a big fan of A CHILD’S XMAS IN WALES @BigJimBob. It always makes me laugh.

      This one was new to me but is just as good.

      Thomas was a very keen cinema-goer. His stories are always so wonderfully visual.

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s–7g4alO5g

      I was reading about the origins of XMASINWALES and found this.

      In 1945, the producer of the Welsh Children’s Hour, Lorraine Davies, wrote to Thomas suggesting a talk entitled “Memories of Christmas”. Thomas thought that this was “a perfectly good title to hang something on”, and by the autumn he had finished work on a reading for the show. It was accepted by BBC in London, but Derek McCulloch (Uncle Mac), the presenter and producer of Children’s Hour, was unhappy about allowing the “notoriously tricky” Thomas to read the piece live, which was the normal practice of the show. In a letter to Thomas, McCulloch wrote there were technical reasons that prevented their recording it live on that day. Thomas recorded the work in advance.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Child%27s_Christmas_in_Wales

      I remember Uncle Mac from Children’s Favourites request programme on Saturday mornings.

      A dry old stick, he left the show once the kids starting requesting My Generation, Wild Thing and Jumping Jack Flash.

        • It look like he might have needed a disguise @vulpesvulpes. I was rather taken aback by this 2012 article from the INDEPENDENT.

          http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/bitter-infighting-sweeps-the-bbc-8229384.html

          Accusations were flying in every direction at the BBC.

          In an article for the London Review of Books, author Andrew O’Hagan claims BBC broadcaster Lionel Gamlin, who produced children’s programmes and presented Top of the Form, regularly had sex with young boys in a secret Fitzrovia hideaway during the 1950s.

          O’Hagan says parents’ complaints were waved away as fiction by the office of the director general whose letters said: “The nation wouldn’t understand such an accusation against a much-loved figure.”

  15. Ever since you mentioned that George Martin album of UMW @vulpes-vulpes, I’ve been looking around for tracks on the TUBE.

    I was particularly interested in Mary Hopkins’s contribution. This morning I found this

    I then also stumbled across this, another more operatic setting of music to DT’S lyrics by Stephen Goss.

    And now yet another setting, from an UMW Opera written by John Metcalf.

    MILKWOOD is a gift that keep on giving.

  16. My goodness, Mary and Freddie together deliver that piece in great style don’t they? His voice is deliciously rich – ‘rumbling thunder’ is the description I like best, and Mary Hopkin never seems to have got the full respect she deserved as a singer – a wonderfully pure voice, always in tune and a great interpretative singer. I have her second album ‘Earth Song/Ocean Song’ and its a superb album.

  17. You can do a nice circular walk around Laugharne, which goes past Thomas’s grave, and ‘The Boathouse’. One side of the gravestone is for him, the other for his wife. One of the few graves of famous people I’ve intentionally visited. The other being Spike Milligan’s, at Winchelsea. I wanted to tell him how much my dad enjoyed his stuff. He had difficulty hearing, as they were mowing the graveyard.

    Also paid my respects to the Vicar of Stiffkey (see threads passim) when visiting last week.

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