r ill John Greally

THEATRE
' CELTIC HIGHLIGHT
poi R ANYONE who likes Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood, TheatreCioround's staging of it is not to be missed. as the admen say. TheatreGoround, the Royal Shakespeare Cornpany's travelling offshoot which plays this version to schools and community centres, hailed for the whole of last week to give the West End a taste of it.
Directed by Terry Hands, this translation of Thomas's radio fantasy into the visual, direct-contact language of theatre is superb. The two narrators, and the five barefoot players with their spectrum of quick-change character parts, lay on a feast of highly skilled and talented stagework.
Of the two who stand out among them, Sheila Allen's range of portrayal is particularly amazing. At one moment she is the pretty, tantalising Polly Garter, at another, a great floppy, dewlapped fishwife.
Peter Geddis has an agility
and facial plasticity that is nothing short of simian. His henpecked Mr. Pugh, whenever Mrs. F'ugh's back is turned, becomes a diabolical death-plotter whose malice flashes out at her from eyes glaring like poached eggs. But always at the very height of his murderous fantasies Mrs. Pugh (Susan Fleetwood) happens to scowl on him, and he collapses into a cringing "Yes, dear.
The general inadequacy of the simulated Welsh accents in this production will grate on some ears, but the alternative —making the actors speak in their on accents—would do even more violence to Thomas's script. As it is, the ear becomes used to it.
But surely it's time the dernythologisers got to work on the venerated text of "Milk Wood." The exuberance of its language and imagery will always have a life of its own, and it is possible to find the lechery, hypocrisy, backbiting and boozing of his characters in the bit of Wales that Thomas knew, as in any nonCeltic small town.
What is bad about this pageant of Welsh small-town life is the total artistic effect. It is bad because it is just not true. It is not true because. while it affects a vital expensiveness, it is smaller than life.
In "Under Milk Wood," Thomas capitalised on the English and the American drawing-room dream of Welsh folk in their natural habitat. The secret of its success among the cultured classes in England, America and elsewhere—including Wales to an extent—is that it bolsters up this dream. You have only to see such dreamers at work listening to the flow of words, or reading them to the ceiling, to see the process in action.
This is not to complain of "Milk Wood" on the ground that it is a myth. Heaven knows we are badly enough in need of a mythology for our time. But to hold in awe. as people do, this hotch-potch of self-hating nationalism, subFreudian yearning and pub bawdry, is surely overdoing it.