Dylan Thomas

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A BBC Radio full-cast production

Under Milk Wood

Chelsea Dreaming

A tour de force of oral poetry which oozes word pictures and onomatopoeic musicality

A dazzling combination of poetic fireworks and music-hall humor

Dylan Thomas...was the most musical of poets. His work is so full of rhythm and melody that one of life's great pleasures is to read him aloud, feeling those syllables roll around your mouth while the rhythms find their ebb and flow

Thomas stretches out his sentences into great, rolling, relentless waves, or crushes words together into compound coinages as the voices whisper and declaim: the play is bawdy, tragic, lyrical, sly, odd, familiar, broad and deep by turns

I'm not sure anyone really needs my opinion on 'Under Milk Wood' as Thomas wrote it. But for what it's worth I think it's brilliant - time hasn't dimmed it, his language remains bracingly wild, elemental and weird

[Thomas] conscripts metaphors, rapes the dictionary and builds a verbal bawdy-house where words mate and couple on the wing, like swifts. Nouns dress up, quite unself-consciously, as verbs, sometimes balancing three-tiered epithets on their heads and often alliterating to boot

A Play for Voices

'It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black...' 
 
Under Milk Wood tells the story of a Welsh village during one spring day. It is populated by some of the best-loved characters in British literature. Lyrical, funny, moving, it is rooted in place but with a universality that has spoken to generations of readers. A Welsh epic, a work of poetic genius, a modern classic. 
 
'A tour de force of oral poetry which oozes word pictures and onomatopoeic musicality' Guardian

Dylan Thomas was born in Swansea in 1914. He was the author of some of Britain's best-loved poems including 'Do not go gentle into that good night' and 'And death shall have no dominion', as well as the radio play Under Milk Wood. Although undistinguished at school Thomas began writing and publishing poetry as a teenager. After moving from Swansea to London in 1934 he published 18 Poems, his first volume of verse. It was critically acclaimed and Thomas's reputation grew, both as a poet and as an exuberant personality. In 1937 he married Caitlin Macnamara and they moved to Laugharne, Wales, the town that would become the inspiration for the setting of Under Milk Wood. During the Second World War, Thomas was declared unfit for service and stayed in London, working as a scriptwriter and broadcaster for Strand Films and the BBC. He also continued to write collections of poetry and short stories as well as touring in the US. In October 1953 he returned for a fourth visit to America despite visibly poor health. He had spent much of that year revising Under Milk Wood but he died in New York before the BBC could record it. The first broadcast came two months later in January 1954 and starred Richard Burton. Dylan Thomas is buried in Laugharne.

Under Milk Wood

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