Darkness is enfolding and incantatory, cradling and haunted in a radio play best listened to with one's eyes closed. Even so, once again Under Milk Wood is being transfered to film. Kevin Allen, Murray Lachlan Young and Rhys Ifans will discuss the production and other Dylan Thomas interest on a panel at Festival No 6, 2014.
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, fishingboatbobbing sea." Say it softly, and slowly, in your head. The kind of total darkness that enfolds the Welsh seaside town of "Llareggub" (bugger all backwards) at the opening of Dylan Thomas's wonderful mid-century "play for voices", which interweaves the thoughts and words of upwards of 60 characters over one day, is lost to the modern world. But it is also the incantatory darkness of dreams and visions, death and memory, as an observing consciousness creeps into the "blinded bedrooms" of the town's inhabitants, hushing and inviting us on: "Come now, drift up the dark, come up the drifting sea-dark street now in the dark night seesawing like the sea ... "
The "silences and echoes of the passages of the eternal night", from whence these voices come, are where we rest, sleep and dream, and where the dead can return to us - where death, as Thomas puts it elsewhere, can "have no dominion". There is a great calm benevolence about the cradling darkness in Under Milk Wood: it is communal and comforting; a welcome respite as well as a realm of fancy.
"The only sea I saw Was the seesaw sea With you riding on it. Lie down, lie easy. Let me shipwreck in your thighs." You are passionately invited to attend the Dylan Thomas Tribute at Festival No. 6 marking the centenary of his birth.
