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(4 / 5)

First performed in America in 1953, and broadcast posthumously as a radio play by the BBC in 1954, Under Milk Wood has had many adaptations for the stage. This is the first time that accessibility has been integral to the performance and design.

The production is part of Craidd, a collaboration between five Welsh organisations working to improve mainstream representation of Deaf and disabled people both on and off stage across Wales. This staging uses integrated British Sign Language (BSL) and captioning.

This means that accessibility is literally centre stage at many times and fully incorporated into the staging. BSL trained actors are key to the delivery. use is made of video and back projections to magnify some of the action on the stage. Text is not standard surtitles but rather animated and colourful, shifting and dissolving – enhancing the experience for most in the audience.

As a seeing and hearing member of the audience it’s at times difficult to know where to focus the attention. This is a recognition of how compelling the different aspects of the production are – the imaginative captioning text which is difficult to keep your eyes off but also wishing to constantly refocus on the considerable skills of the actors. You get better at that as the play progresses. This type of accessible theatre, built into its design at the outset, can be potentially engaging for all members of the audience.

It’s an excellent ensemble piece (with each actor playing multiple roles), fast-paced and funny, musical and magical with a dizzying array of characters. This is not a conventional play in terms of plot or narrative drive. An omniscient narrator guides us through the lives and loves of the villagers and this along with interconnected vignettes advances the action. Scene settings, of which there are many, are suggested by precise lighting and sound design along with creative props. The pace of constant change makes this demanding stagecraft but it feels effortless.

Hayley Grindle’s set and lighting are stand out. The cottages imagined as oversize doll’s houses, sometimes ordered, other times in disarray, depending on the time of day, often providing a glorious warm glow to proceedings.

Kate Wasserberg has not shied away from the darker, at times uncomfortable, themes in the play, more prevalent in Part 2. ‘There’s a nasty lot lives here when you come to think.’ gets one of the bigger laughs of the evening. A lot more than mischief is hinted at in the lives of the community.

At the end we are full circle, another night is approaching. Something very like this will be happening tomorrow.

This staging captures and amplifies the play for voices – tender and poignant, funny and irreverent, lyrical and bawdy. Theatre Clwyd’s Under Milk Wood is a captivating imagining of Dylan Thomas’ masterpiece.

Andy Stroud

Credits

Creative: Hayley Grindle (Set and Costume Design), Katie Elin-Salt (Associate
Director & Dramaturg), Laura Meaton (Movement Director), Adam Bassett (BSL Director), Joshua Pharo & Sarah Readman (Co-Lighting, Video & Creative Caption Designers, Oliver Vibrans (Composer), Lynwen Haf Roberts (Musical Director), Liam Quinn (Sound Designer), Jacob Sparrow (Casting Director).

Production: Suzy Sommerville (Production Manager), Alec Reece (Stage Manager),

Music has time signatures lending themselves to jigs, waltzes and marches, folk songs and syncopated jazz tunes.  Music can be loud and soft and can move between loud and soft.  The banality of the disco sound is that the rhythm is unvaried and insistent;  the volume is always loud.  Tracks meld into each other and become indistinguishable.

So, whilst the idea of providing a story with a musical background is a fine in principle, using a disco backing has its drawbacks.  Apart from the repetitiveness, you have to shout to make yourself heard above it, which means less flexibility in your voice. That said, whilst I was getting a bit of a headache myself, I did notice other members of the audience were responding to the tracks positively. 

(The fact I dislike disco music didn’t mean I couldn’t appreciate the skilful way the DJ – Onai – worked her turntables.  The show depended on her carefully synchronising the sound with the action going on in front of her desk.  She also had to act herself from time to time, changing her role from that of a visible technician to that of a member of the cast, becoming part of the small society who gave the main character her identity.)

I also noticed the audience laughing at the wisecracks that came in over the top of the background noise.  Personally, I don’t find the use of Very Rude Words funny.  I find swearing and the pulling of faces childish rather than witty but stand-up comedy is popular and it seems to require comics to be rude and crude.  Katie Payne’s monologue therefore appeals to a different demographic to that often seen at the theatre.  If utilising contemporary cultural material, like disco music and stand-up routines, pulls in a new crowd, this is reasonable.  I approve of it, even if I don’t like it myself.  There were over a hundred people in the audience at Theatr Clwyd on a Tuesday night, many of whom would not have been drawn by Shakespeare, Beckett or even Alan Ayckbourn.

Still, what Katie Payne – the author as well as the performer of ‘My Mixed Up Tape’ – was saying and energetically doing on stage didn’t interest me until her show changed from being a type of ultra physical stand-up routine and turned into a short play.  It became more serious. This shift coincided with a specific moment in the story she was telling.

The show starts with Psycho Phoebe thrown out of her cousin’s wedding by a ‘neckless’ bouncer.  As she is aggressive, destructive, potty-mouthed and has a huge chip on her shoulder, this seems justified.  The only mystery is why she would want to go back inside where she is not welcome.  She has quarrelled with the guests and despises most of them.  But she does want – or need – to go back in, and the play proper gets under way when she manages to sneak back under the arm of the bouncer. 

Now Katie Payne can show us Phoebe encountering and having to deal with – her cousin, her mother and father, her aunt, her ex-boyfriend and her ex-best friend and another, representative female guest.  What has basically been a long moan up to that point – another verbose complaint about life – becomes a three-dimensional reality.

Katie Payne herself is a stage dynamo, with the agility and the timing of a trained dancer.  She is full of ideas, gestures and postures and I liked those of her jokes that did not depend on obscenities.  She is also an excellent mimic.  This meant that, in between dancing about furiously and talking to the audience she can talk to herself in different voices and accents, establishing credible conversations with others who are not there.  This is clever.  It happens convincingly, and she didn’t appear to put a foot wrong for an hour and a quarter, despite the necessary speed of her delivery.  Phoebe’s story is not a complex one but reconstructing it in detail whilst sustaining the pace is no mean task.

When the show does become three-dimensional, building the agendas of an imaginary set of characters, it starts to have a lot more impact.  Up until the moment when Phoebe gets back in to rejoin the wedding crowd, I was wondering, why bother with this story?  Why use this level of theatrical skill and creativity to foreground someone so unpleasant?  However, the effort Katie Payne was putting in gradually started to achieve the result she was after.  Phoebe became more than just the sum of her parts.  We got to see behind her clown mask and find out who she really was behind her posturing.

Returning to hometown Pontypridd after vowing to shake its dust from her shoes was not much fun for Phoebe.  She was never going to give a rendition of The Green, Green, Grass of Home.  For her, Pontypridd is more like Philip Larkin’s provincial town, which he categorised as ‘intensely sad’.   But she has to revisit it to remind herself why she left it.  She has to formally break up with her best friend and her cousin and absorb some of her mother’s homespun, fridge magnet wisdom.  She needs to listen to the tape her aunt once made of her talking in public to remember herself as a little girl.  She has to endure the community’s (imagined) scorn at her failure to make much of herself in London.

So, despite my initial reluctance, I began to sympathise with a character like too many young people today who, deprived of ideals and opportunities, have neither the education nor the particular talent necessary to make a go of their lives but who still long for something, for anything more.  The fifties had James Dean, the original rebel without a cause, and the sixties had Mick Jagger, who couldn’t get no satisfaction.  The twenty twenties, then, have mixed up Phoebes, out on a limb, wanting something that Katie Payne knows cannot just be put into words.  The presentation of this unidentifiable but deep longing is what got her performance at Theatr Clwyd a standing ovation.

At Theatr Clwyd, the show was followed by a discussion with Katie Payne and Stef O’Driscoll, its director.  A good performance doesn’t need a follow-up but there was an interesting mention of ADHD in it.  Although Phoebe’s behaviour is extreme, the condition doesn’t crop up specifically in the play (unless I missed it).  Skirting the topic means the short story can focus on someone who has good, everyday reasons to be frustrated.  Introducing it would have meant considering Phoebe’s problems from a different perspective and changing its emphasis on the restrictions of small town life.

Simon Kensdale