“Love the words!”

That was the crisp command from Dylan Thomas, the 20^th-century Welsh poet, to the cast of his radio play Under Milk Wood, just before a rehearsal in New York in 1953. Not long after, Thomas was dead. His entreaty to “love the words” is a fitting legacy. Thomas was a writer enchanted by the sound and song of language. He infused his work with the Anglo-Welsh rhythms absorbed during his childhood in Swansea and among Welsh speakers – despite not knowing the language himself. It is this unique brand of poetry that sings throughout Under Milk Wood. 

Under Milk Wood is an idiosyncratic blend of verse, radio, and theatre of the mind. It captures a day in the ordinary life of the fictionalised Welsh village, Llareggub (spelling “bugger all” backwards), featuring an ensemble of eccentric characters. 

We hear the gossipy repartee of neighbours, the Reverend Eli Jenkins’ “greenleaved sermon on the innocence of men”, and the musings of Captain Cat, still haunted by the ghosts of companions drowned at sea; Thomas distills the “big seas of their dreams” and evokes a world in the mind’s eye.

The most famous and beloved version was the 1954 BBC radio broadcast, with Richard Burton as the First Voice (one of two narrators). It invites listeners to conjure their own version of the “lulled and dumbfound town” from the musicality of Thomas’ words and the sound design they are surrounded by. The radio version is intimate; the narrators entreat us to “look”, “listen”, and “come closer now”, assuming a new joyful urgency via their direct address.

The radio version is not bound by the logistical constraints of the stage. Yet the play has also been performed in theatres countless times, and even adapted into film. So in which form can we “love the words” best – radio, or the stage?

One of the most innovative stagings came in the National Theatre’s (NT) version in 2021, directed by Lyndsey Turner. It retains the hallucinatory quality of the original play, but uses the conceit of a care-home setting to establish a frame narrative around Under Milk Wood.

At the heart of Turner’s version is the casting of Michael Sheen in the role of Owain Jenkins, a character unique to this interpretation. He fulfils the roles of the narrators with a joyous spontaneity – as if he had just thought of his lines. Sheen is all wheeling limbs and breathless poetry. There is an effortless ease to his movement between the dream-like world of Under Milk Wood and that of the care-home, where he visits his father who has dementia. Sheen’s verse becomes an attempt to help his father recall the Llareggub of his youth.

Turner largely maintains the pace of Thomas’ roving narrators, the First and Second Voice. Yet these transitions are seamless in radio. In this sense, a staged version of Under Milk Wood may always be trying to chase after audio’s aural echoes.

Indeed, the NT’s austere set still requires an imaginative leap from the audience into the world of Llareggub. In a theatre among hundreds, though, there is a sense of community more absent from audio. You are less like a child lulled to sleep by bedtime tales, and are instead conscious of being one in a crowd, as if in one of the pubs Thomas frequented, over-hearing him mutter to himself while scribbling.

Perhaps audio remains the best medium for a conventional interpretation of Under Milk Wood that highlights its poetry – where “sound [is] as important as sense”, as Poetry Foundation says of Thomas’ work. For when the BBC released Under Milk Woods, a spiritual successor to the play in honour of its 70^th anniversary, it was dramatised for the radio. In five short episodes, it captured the daily life of ordinary modern-day Welsh people in five different places. As in the play, you are transported into the characters’ world by the narrators to “hear their dreams”. The format of Under Milk Woods displays how the now-episodic nature of audio drama has begun to shape aural storytelling, even within the radio play tradition.

So in staging Under Milk Wood, which version is more successful? The rich baritone of Burton or the electrifying physicality of Sheen? Should stage try to imitate the radio, or play to its own visual strengths?

Future dramatists will continue to grapple with these concerns, against the backdrop of ever-increasingly popular audio forms. You’ll be able to see for yourself by watching Guy Masterson’s one-man rendition of Under Milk Wood, showing at the Oxford Playhouse this July. 

But come what may, the poetry of Dylan Thomas and Under Milk Wood will endure – for “death shall have no dominion” over his song.

Guy Masterson’s performance of Under Milk Wood will be at the Oxford Playhouse on 15th July.

As students left Oxford on the last weekend of Hilary, I visited St John’s College’s auditorium to witness the final hurrah of term: the biennial Sanskrit play. This year, the play of choice was Śūdraka’s Mṛcchakatika (The Little Clay Cart), directed by Ricardo Paccagnella and delivered entirely in Sanskrit, with surtitles translated by Professor Toby Hudson and Dominik Tůma. Both the Saturday and Sunday night performances were almost entirely sold-out, making the event a joyful reinvigoration of Sanskrit literature and legacy, bringing together long-time learners of Sanskrit and the completely uninitiated alike.

The play follows the folk tale, formalised in verse by Śūdraka, of the generous and impoverished brahmin Cārudattaḥ (Lucas Ali-Hassan), as he falls in love with the highly-respected, wealthy courtesan Vasantasenā (Althea Sovani). However, their romance is threatened by the king’s arrogant brother-in-law, Saṃsthānakaḥ (Riccardo Paccagnella), who pursues Vasantasenā despite her refusal of him, believing that if he can’t have her, no one should. 

Given that the original play would have been performed for at least six hours, Paccagnella and his crew did an impressive job of cutting down the runtime to just over two. Yet, what impressed me even more was that the actors were able to deliver all their lines over the course of 150 minutes with little falter, including the song-like classical rasas (‘poetic sentiments’, as explained by the brochure). The first strain of this metre, put to melody, was slightly jarring to hear – the only contemporary theatre we really see songs in is musicals, after all, and this play was far from that – but it didn’t take too long to attune. The cast wove deftly in and out of these refrains, with the script also interspersed with surprisingly comic moments. Particularly commendable in this respect were Paccagnella’s and Althea’s performances: their deliveries were effusive and evocative, clearly expressing the snide plotting of Saṃsthānakaḥ and the joyful wit of Vasantasenā. Not only did they bring their characters to life, but it was clear to me – despite my complete lack of Sanskrit knowledge – what part of the line they were delivering: A feat of acting, not just academics. 

This play and its characters were also surprising in just how familiar they were. Despite being written one and a half millennia ago, many of the elements of The Little Clay Cart are still highly recognisable to a modern audience: the scheming villain with unguarded ambition; the down-on-his-luck hero, noble to a fault; the plucky, irreverent best friend – known here as Maitreyaḥ (Vishal Rameshbabu). Its themes of jealousy, adoration, slighted masculinity, poverty, corruption – all these are timeless and endlessly explored. Even the comedy of errors that drives the main action of the plot seems to foreshadow Shakespeare by almost a thousand years; equally, the moments of pathos and genuine shock from the audience as Saṃsthānakaḥ seems to succeed in his goal, demonstrates its lasting resonance. 

Throughout the play, the ingenuity required of all student productions also came through in many ways. While on stage, the costumes were flawlessly executed – striped dhoti, transparent veils, and loose, looping fabrics, in the style of paintings found in the Ajanta caves, providing a distinctive look for each character – the behind-the-scenes of the costuming revealed a flurry of activity. The brochure for the play showed reams of fabric laid out in college JCRs and gardens, waiting for the stripes of paint to dry; as housemates with one of the costumers, Benjamin Atkinson, I was a first-hand witness to the time he spent on this project; from whittling spears for the guards to tie-dying fabric. The eponymous carts rattling familiarly across the stage were themselves the trundling trolleys used for transporting Merton College’s vacation storage. Knowing the secrets behind the aesthetics of the play didn’t ruin it by any means – in fact, it only made it all the more spectacular to see it come together. 

More than that, the play was also a bringing together of people. On entry, I noted that the audience was predominantly made up of relatively older attendees – townspeople, without direct affiliation to the University, who might have already come to see previous Sanskrit productions before. Various professors also made up the ensemble, alongside students: Seeing Professors Diwakar Acharya and Jonathan Katz play as the villainous Saṃsthānakaḥ’s lackeys was comic to say the least. In many ways, this untraditional ensemble reflects the ways in which the original 5th century script broke with convention: it featured various dialects spoken by common people, collectively known as Prakrits, and not just the Sanskrit of the elite; it told the stories of courtesans, thieves, and gamblers, not just the nobility; and it did not borrow from mythology, but from the lives of real people. 

It’s clear that a lot of heart went into The Little Clay Cart – the love that the entire ensemble had for the language shone through the whole production. It’s definitely worth keeping your eye out for the next time that one of these Sanskrit plays, just like a little clay cart, rolls around.