Under Milk Wood review – dark fairytales swirl around Dylan Thomas’s evergreen village

Director Kate Wasserberg emphasises the fantasy and supernatural elements of the poet’s ‘play for voices’ in an entertaining and inclusive production

As with Molière at the Comédie-Française or Brecht in Berlin, there is a satisfying smack of regional reality in watching Dylan Thomas’s classic invocation of an early spring day in Wales staged as the real Flintshire thing glitters tantalisingly through the panoramic lobby windows of Theatr Clwyd.

Watching being the key word. Premiered on radio in 1954, Under Milk Wood stands with Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons as a rare sound play to have grown into a theatrical classic. Whereas Thomas left it to the ears to envisage the musical obsessive Organ Morgan, the much-loved Polly Garter and other residents of his fabulous valleys village, directors and designers have a free hand to visualise.

Lyndsey Turner’s 2021 National Theatre version emphasised realism, adding a frame story of Michael Sheen’s narrator staging the play in a rest home to stir the memories of a father with dementia. Conversely, Kate Wasserberg’s staging emphasises fantasy and the supernatural, feeling influenced by Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s Into the Woods, presenting the play as a sequence of plaited legends and fairytales featuring drowned sailors and longing lovers.

Although the play is sometimes dismissed by casual consumers as whimsical nostalgia, Thomas’s Llareggub is a dark place. “There’s a nasty lot lives here when you come to think,” says the main narrator, Voice One, and that lot includes a would-be wife-killer, more than one sex offender and several of the dead. In that aspect, Thomas may have been influenced by Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, now on tour with Sheen’s Welsh National Theatre, and certainly the plays form an intriguing unofficial double bill.

Wasserberg reorganises some of Under Milk Wood – helping to smooth out later longueurs caused by Thomas’s fatally declining health – and redistributes Voice One’s long organising monologue among 11 actors, each playing several parts. Making Polly Garter polyphonic, this production by Craidd (a Welsh collective including Deaf, disabled and neurodivergent artists) also puts other speech registers on stage, including British Sign Language. Inclusively, the text is projected on a cyclorama, adding to our relish of Thomas’s perky wordplay, although the use of the Welsh form Llaregyb means English viewers lose the reversed swear word in Llareggub.

Macsen McKay entertainingly plays undertaker Evans the Death and the uxoricidal Mr Pugh among five named parts, while throwing in for free the boy who barks like a dog. Caroline Parker gives individual variety to five wives and mothers, Seán Carlsen pairs a saintly Rev Eli Jenkins with a sin-hunting PC Atilla Rees and Georgia Griffiths’ Polly shows the bad memory beneath the good times she seeks, and tinglingly sings two songs in a score by Oliver Vibrans that Organ Morgan would be glad to get his hands on.

• At Theatr Clwyd, Mold, from 21 March to 4 April