THEATER CHRONICLE
"ISN'T LIFE A TERRIBLE TH lNG, THANK GOD"
Dylan Thomas's radio play,
Under Milk Wood,
sometimes
sounds like a liquefied Welsh version of Joyce's Dublin Nighttown,
with
the tears flowing freely and the laughter running over. All of Joyce's
buried sentiment, all his wry ultimate acquiescence in the lifeness
of
life, briskly surfaces in
Under Milk Wood,
disports itself in shameless
abandon, and cries with Polly Garter, the town fancy-woman of
the
play, "Oh, isn't life a terrible thing, thank God." No anomalies or con–
tradictions in this Welsh dream-village, no heartbroken mothers, spoiled
priests or wandering Jews. Where Joyce and his generation had been
intense, haunted and hard-working, Thomas was sportive, protean, de–
fiantly untragic. He was Glendower to their Hotspur and could
caD
spirits from the vasty deep by simply raising his voice.
If
they had
strained, he relaxed; though he did so in a medium of language
and
fancy which they had helped to renew-as it were, for his pleasure.
He
made a playground of their time-defying and nature-resistant monuments
of the literary art, climbing all over their obdurate surfaces and cheer·
fully defiling them. He was the artist as a young dog, as the title of
his
volume of autobiographic sketches made clear.
In its writing,
Under Milk Wood
is sometimes slavishly Joycean.
"From Benyon Butchers in Coronation Street, the smell of fried liver
sidles out with onions on its breath. And listen! In the dark breakfast·
room behind the shop, Mr. and Mrs. Benyon, waited upon by their
treasure, enjoy, between bites, their everymorning hullabaloo, and
Mrs.
Benyon slips the gristly bits under the tasseled tablecloth to her fat cat."
(I quote from the version of the play that appeared in
Mademoiselle,
February, 1954.) Yet
Under Milk Wood
has its clear originality as a
whole. This consists not only in the broader humor of "liver with onions
on its breath" and similar flights, but in the charmed case with which
the potential anomalies of existence are turned into jests: Mr. Pugh
the
would-be wife-poisoner; Mrs. Ogmore-Pritchard with her two husbands,
both of them dead; Mrs. Willy-Nilly the postman's wife, "full of tea
to her double-chinned brim . . . and always ready to steam open the
mail." Then there is the radical loosening of Joyce's austere form, the
i
