Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

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

Plus: a play that would have delighted Quentin Crisp at the Southwark Playhouse

The punishing new preamble to the National Theatre's new production of Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood. Image: Johan Persson 
issue 03 July 2021

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.

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