Welsh wonders to reopen National
CELEBRATED Welsh stars Michael Sheen and Sian Phillips will lead the National Theatre out of lockdown with a jam-packed production of Dylan Thomas’s masterpiece Under Milk Wood.
Olivier award-winning director Lyndsey Turner, an associate of the NT, will stage Thomas’s play for voices in the Olivier Theatre.
The National’s hierarchy had considered reopening its South Bank complex with a new work, a move felt more appropriate for the occasion by some.
However, they were persuaded by Turner’s apparently ‘visionary’ ideas of staging Under Milk Wood, which took Thomas close to 20 torturous years to finally complete.
(The first full version of the radio play was broadcast from
Manhattan cultural and community centre 92nd Street Y in 1954).
The plan is for the work to begin previews at the NT from June 16, with an official opening night on June 26.
Both Sheen and Phillips have form with Under Milk Wood. They took part in a BBC Wales commemorative version, to celebrate the centenary of the poet’s birth in 2014; and have been associated with several other productions. Sheen also directed a reading, on the 92Y stage where the play made its debut.
Set in the fictional Welsh fishing village of Llareggub (bugger-all, backwards), the scabrous piece charts a day in the life of the area’s colourful inhabitants who have been ‘lulled and dumbfounded’ by events; which seems fitting, given the current circumstances. (More cast are being assembled to play the residents of Llareggub.)
My own first live experience of the richness of Thomas’s verse was seeing Richard Burton act as the Narrator when passages from Under Milk Wood were recited during a celebration of Thomas’s work at the Duke of York’s Theatre in 1982.
Elizabeth Taylor was in town, too. That was one helluva night.