NS Archive 2018: Under Milk Wood

Fri 2 – Sat 17 Nov 2018

“It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobblestreets silent and the hunched, courters’-and rabbits’ wood limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea” 

Sit back, settle in and prepare to be immersed in the dreams, disappointments and desires of the inhabitants of the small Welsh fishing village of Llarreggub (‘bugger all’ backwards).. 

Captain Cat, the old blind sea captain who dreams of his drowned shipmates; Myfanwy Price, the sweetshop-keeper lusting after Mog Edwards; Organ Morgan, obsessed with his music; postman Willy Nilly who reads his neighbours’ letters; and Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard, relentlessly nagging her two dead husbands. 

Originally written as a radio drama by Welsh poet Dylan Thomas and later made into a film starting Richard Burton with Elizabeth Taylor and Peter O’Toole, Northern Stage’s Under Milk Wood is a contemporary, technological twist on a classic text from The War of The Worlds director Elayce Ismail.  

An enfolding, haunting and at times unsettling experience, this ‘play for voices’ looks beyond Dylan’s bawdy, tragic, sly and lyrical world for a glimpse of a golden era that may never have existed.