Enjoyable in spite of the National’s best efforts: Under Milk Wood reviewed

Before the National Theatre produced Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood they had to make a decision. How could they stuff this dazzling, rapturous comic tone-poem with misery and pain? The policy at the NT is that ticket holders must endure a play rather than enjoy it. They had four options. Racism, homophobia, misogyny and mental illness are the sources of woe most favoured by modern theatre-makers. The NT duly ticked box four, mental breakdown, and hired a writer, Siân Owen, to supply the necessary dollops of torment by penning a one-act melodrama as a preamble to the script itself.

The setting is an old folks’ home which looks like a branch of Wetherspoons or an activity centre for pensioners. A real care home is full of colourless wilting old wrecks, chiefly female and mostly deaf, who do nothing all day but sit in chairs staring straight ahead of them. Activity is rare. Conversation rarer. But in this place everyone buzzes with energy and purpose. The women quarrel over the TV set and clack away at their knitting needles making scarves and tank-tops. The men, who are as numerous as the women, fill in crossword puzzles and build complicated model ships. Everyone is Welsh, including the employees. That seems wrong. Where are the Poles, the Slovaks, the Filipinos? Many care homes in Wales have difficulty recruiting local staff.

Only one of the inmates suffers from a disability. His name is Richard Jenkins, which is a joke for the cognoscenti. Richard Burton, who narrated the play for the BBC in 1954, was born with the surname Jenkins. The old chap is told that a visitor is due to see him but he doesn’t understand because dementia has stolen his memory.