UNDER MILK WOOD
Featuring Kenneth Welsh. Written by Dylan Thomas. Directed by Ted
Dykstra. Presented by Soulpepper Theatre Company. Extended to Aug 9. Mon-Sat,
8pm; Wed & Sat mat 2pm. Single tickets, $34-$65; students with ID
or those aged 21-30, $28; regular rush $20; youth rush $5 (age 21 and
under). Young Centre, Bldg. 49, Distillery Historic District, 55 Mill.
416-866-8666. www.soulpepper.ca.
Soulpepper’s production of Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood is rapturous and infuriating in almost equal measure — rapturous because of the tour-de-force performance of Kenneth Welsh in the play’s more than 50 roles, infuriating because Ted Dykstra’s production seems determined to undermine the beauty of Thomas’s highly poetic text.
Under Milk Wood, called “a play for voices” by the poet was written as a radio play. Welsh takes all the parts just as Thomas did in the play’s first broadcast in 1953. In it an omniscient narrator slips in and out of the minds of the inhabitants of the fictional Welsh village of Llareggub (“bugger all” spelt backwards). This collective portrait moves from night to day to night, from dream to waking to dream and finds in life a constant longing for love to ward off fear of death, although the two are inexorably linked. Captain Cat’s love of his life is dead. So is the promiscuous Polly Garter’s one true love. Mrs. Ogmore-Pritchard still orders about the ghosts of her two dead husbands. Savagely henpecked Mr. Pugh fantasizes about poisoning Mrs Pugh. Welsh makes this huge cast of old and young, male and female, wise and naive come brilliantly to life through simple changes in posture and voice, clearly revelling in the sheer beauty of Thomas’s language. As Anton Piatigorsky says in his background notes, “Under Milk Wood is a piece of music for the theatre. Thomas is as much its composer as its playwright."
Why then does Dykstra feel the need to add two Foley artists and a musician to the piece? Whenever a seagull is mentioned we hear its squawk, a cat its meow, a door its squeak, pedestrians their footsteps. The sounds of Llareggub are already embedded in the assonance, consonance and alliteration of Thomas’s highly lyrical prose. The sound effects, no matter how well done, are insulting to the text and the performer and a constant distraction. Audience members can’t help looking away from Welsh to see how the Foley artists make their odd noises. If that were not enough, Dykstra adds musical accompaniment by Mike Ross, pleasant in itself, but completely unnecessary and often overwhelming Welsh’s words. Dykstra directs the piece at too fast a pace and since he is focussed on the superficialities of sounds and not the meaning of Thomas’s text, the effect is neither as comic nor as poignant as it should be. There is lifelong heartbreak in this village and a strong undertow of death but Dykstra never stops long enough for this to sink in. Kenneth Welsh playing out Thomas’s text all alone on Lorenzo Savoini’s memory-cluttered attic of a set would be heaven. Too bad Dykstra’s inane soundscape treats Thomas’s poetry as bugger all.