"Under Milk Wood" by Dylan Thomas

“To begin at the beginning: 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. The houses are blind as moles (though moles see fine to-night in the snouting, velvet dingles) or blind as Captain Cat there in the muffled middle by the pump and the town clock, the shops in mourning, the Welfare Hall in widows' weeds. And all the people of the lulled and dumbfound town are sleeping now.”

This is a play for voices, first performed on the radio with the mellifluous Richard Burton supplying the narration. It was written by Dylan Thomas who, as you can see in the quote above, had a way with words.

The story is set over a single day in the Welsh seaside town of Llareggyb - famously, Thomas originally used the name Llareggub because it was ‘bugger all’ backwards, but was persuaded to modify it.

It starts at night, with the inhabitants of the town asleep and dreaming. Typically, they dream of sex. Miss Price, for example, dreams of “her lover, tall as the town clock tower, Samsonsyrup-gold-maned, whacking thighed and piping hot, thunderbolt-bass'd and barnacle-breasted, flailing up the cockles with his eyes like blowlamps and scooping low over her lonely loving hotwaterbottled body.” Sex pervades the play, portrayed, not in a romantic air-brushed light but as an everyday, matter-of-fact, warts-and-all, embodied coupling and conjugating.

Death is also present in dreams. Captain Cat dreams of drowned shipmates. Mrs Ogden-Pritchard is with both her husbands, Mr Ogden and Mr Pritchard, in her dreams.

The dawn arrives and the inhabitants wake and go about their daily lives. Willy Nilly postman delivers letters. Polly Garter scrubs a floor. Sinbad Sailors opens the pub. The children go to school. The listener follows, hopping from character to character. From time to time the narrator interrupts with a set piece, marking the hours of the day like a prayer:

• “There's the clip clop of horses on the sunhoneyed cobbles of the humming streets, hammering of horse- shoes, gobble quack and cackle, tomtit twitter from the bird-ounced boughs, braying on Donkey Down. Bread is baking, pigs are grunting, chop goes the butcher, milk-churns bell, tills ring, sheep cough, dogs shout, saws sing. Oh, the Spring whinny and morning moo from the clog dancing farms, the gulls' gab and rabble on the boat-bobbing river and sea and the cockles bubbling in the sand, scamper of sanderlings, curlew cry, crow caw, pigeon coo, clock strike, bull bellow, and the ragged gabble of the beargarden school as the women scratch and babble in Mrs Organ Morgan's general shop where everything is sold: custard, buckets, henna, rat-traps, shrimp-nets, sugar, stamps, confetti, paraffin, hatchets, whistles.”
• “The sunny slow lulling afternoon yawns and moons through the dozy town. The sea lolls, laps and idles in, with fishes sleeping in its lap. The meadows still as Sunday, the shut-eye tasselled bulls, the goat-and-daisy dingles, nap happy and lazy. The dumb duck-ponds snooze. Clouds sag and pillow on Llaregyb Hill. Pigs grunt in a wet wallow-bath, and smile as they snort and dream. They dream of the acorned swill of the world, the rooting for pig-fruit, the bagpipe dugs of the mother sow, the squeal and snuffle of yesses of the women pigs in rut. They mud-bask and snout in the pig-loving sun; their tails curl; they rollick and slobber and snore to deep, smug, after-swill sleep. Donkeys angelically drowse on Donkey Down.”

Many of the characters have wonderful names: PC Attila Rees. Polly Garter the good-time girl, Organ Morgan who likes to play his organ at night, Nogood Boyo, Lord Cut-Glass, Willy Nilly postman, Captain Tom Cat, Farmer Utah Watkins from Salt Lake Farm.

I was reminded of Cannery Row by John Steinbeck, another study of the inhabitants of a town. Both authors have a remarkable facility with words. They make their characters come alive. And, crucially, they show life in all its aspects, with empathy, without judgement. As Thomas says: “We are not wholly bad or good/ Who live our lives under Milk Wood.”

Selected quotes:

• “And before you let the sun in, mind it wipes its shoes.”
• “A bit of stone with seaweed spread/ Where gulls come to be lonely.”
• “Mrs Dai Bread Two, gypsied to kill in a silky scarlet petticoat above my knees, dirty pretty knees, see my body through my petticoat brown as a berry, high-heel shoes with one heel missing, tortoiseshell comb in my bright black slinky hair, nothing else at all but a dab of scent, lolling gaudy at the doorway, tell your fortune in the tea-leaves, scowling at the sunshine, lighting up my pipe.”
• “I know what you're thinking, you poor little milky creature. You're thinking, you're no better than you should be, Polly, and that's good enough for me.”
• “From Beynon Butchers in Coronation Street, the smell of fried liver sidles out with onions on its breath.”
• “She feels his goatbeard tickle her in the middle of the world like a tuft of wiry fire, and she turns in a terror of delight away from his whips and whiskery conflagration.”
• “Mrs Pugh smiles. An icicle forms in the cold air of the dining-vault.” Not dining room! Vault. Connotations of a crypt.
• “The only sea I saw/ Was the seesaw sea/ With you riding on it./ Lie down, lie easy./ Let me shipwreck in your thighs.”
• “They make, in front of their looking-glasses, haughty or come-hithering faces for the young men in the street outside, at the lamplit leaning corners, who wait in the all-at-once wind to wolve and whistle.”

May 2025

Originally published in 1954

I read my 2025 Renard Press paperback edition while listening to the BBC Sounds original recording of the radio play version from 1954.

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God