HEATER CHRONICLE
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usical interweaving of the many voices, which transform the sleeping
abitants of Thomas's Welsh village into pure spirit.
Performed by disembodied voices on radio or records,
Under Milk
Wood
is all that it sets out to be. The spirits do really come at the
t's call, the act of levitation takes place before the mind's eye. But
stage the work in the regular way is to risk arousing the Hotspur in
a spectator. This an English company recently did in a production of
Under Milk Wood
imported from London to Henry Miller's Theatre
in
New York. Some fifty players bounced, gestured and hallooed their
way through the text, each of them determined to make the most of
the brief moments allotted him on the stage. In their efforts to look
evanescent, they merely succeeded in falling over one another on a set
which, with its numerous levels and compartments, seemed a cruel
trap. It was pretty clearly a case of over-acting all around. There were,
however, enough vivid passages to suggest that, with a more restrained
cast, the staging of
Under Milk Wood
in the regular way is not im–
possible. As it was, the London production brought out the least en–
dearing aspects of the play. Its vapors tended to collect, settle and con–
dense into cliches.
Dylan Thomas was also the subject of
A Boy Growing Up,
a series
of readings from Thomas's autobiographical sketches. This performance,
devised and carried out by Emlyn Williams, was justly called an "en–
tertainment." Where the cast of
Under Milk Wood
largely failed, Mr.
Williams abundantly succeeded, with only his single voice and no proper–
ties
to speak of and a minimum of bodily motions. But he is a genius
in
this line, able to impersonate a dozen characters at a time and con–
jure up entire physical scenes out of the air. The very frailty of the
original sketches served him, encouraging him to draw on his own rich
resources of humor and imagination.
Poetry seems to remain Britain's most dependable literary export,
for Dylan Thomas has had a greater reputation and influence in this
country than any other British-born writer since Auden. The novelists
and
playwrights of that country get only a passing celebrity here, despite
the eagerness of many Americans to enjoy and learn from them. The
women come and go talking of C. P. Snow--or Henry Green or Gra–
ham
Greene or Christopher Fry-but not for long. Recent English
novelists and playwrights have usually failed to establish themselves
where establishment in the long run counts-with mature writers of the
first order. Perhaps Kingsley Amis, John Wain, John Osborne and
others of the English younger generation will prove more infectioull.
Osborne's play,
Look Back in Anger,
while it is notoriously of this
