The idea:
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The play:
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Under Milk Wood is a play to be heard. We are taking the opportunity to create Llareggub in actual space. Recreating a radio-play (with more than 70 characters!) in a garden is no mean feat; luckily our team consists of a dedicated group of creatives who have been working together to ensure all aspects of design are simultaneous and cohesive. We are using radio-mics to ensure the sound-world for the play is as immersive and surreal as possible, as well as incorporating aspects of pre-recorded voice and music. The performance will begin in promenade, so the audience truly gets a sense of being introduced into Llareggub by the Voices. The beautiful setting of the Master’s Gardens at Univ has provided us with an outdoor space which has enabled us to explore the relationship between language and the natural world, paying homage to Thomas’ roots in the Welsh countryside. Intense language work has allowed the cast to access the musicality and lyrical nature of Thomas’ poetry, which dominates the text. The radio-play fully inhabits the space we are working in.
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Twenty-four hours pass in a small Welsh fishing town, where the villagers live on three streets and seldom venture out of them. There is nothing to suggest that these twenty-four hours that we are shown are any different from any other day in this ‘capital of dusk’. The only thing that is different, or strange, is the very fact we the audience can experience this one day. The outside world might as well not exist for these peculiar, but incredibly ordinary, people. Time passes, but also stands still. Even the dead, who haunt the dreams and waking moments of many of the villagers, can’t ever seem to leave. The play is simultaneously about nothing and everything. Captain Cat mourns his Rosie Probert; Mr Pugh dreams of poisoning his wife; Mog Edwards pines for the love of Miss Price, but can only send her letters. We hear all these stories through the omniscient words of the Voices, two narrators whose relationship to Llareggub is never fully established, but whose guiding hand is intensely and necessarily poetic. The final draft for the play was only completed a month before Dylan Thomas’ death; as such it remains his last literary gift to the world he bitterly and passionately inhabited. All you have to do is read ‘Llareggub’ backwards to see that.
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