Revisiting Milk Wood
Emma Harding explores the creative process behind Under Milk Wood, ahead of a new dramatization for BBC Radio 3.
With a new dramatization set to air on BBC Radio 3 all this week to mark the 70th anniversary of the first broadcast of Dylan Thomas’ Under Milk Wood, Emma Harding reflects on the history of the play.
To begin at the beginning… It’s 70 years since those words were first broadcast on the BBC’s brand new Third Programme. The opening lines of Dylan Thomas’ Under Milk Wood – the radio play that, for many, remains The Radio Play – transport us to the moonless, bible-black streets of a small Welsh seaside town. But Thomas himself never got to hear that famous broadcast. By the time Richard Burton’s baritone caressed the airwaves on January 25th 1954, the play’s 39 year old author was two months’ dead.
In many ways, Thomas’s ‘play for voices’ was the piece he’d been writing all his short life. A succession of short stories, radio scripts and play outlines all felt their way towards the work that Raymond Williams would later describe as Thomas’ ‘adequate epilogue, his uproarious and singing lament’. And the true model for his fictional town, Llarreggub (read it backwards), is also a matter of debate – was it Laugharne in Carmathenshire, New Quay in Ceredigion, or his native Swansea?
Glimmers of Under Milk Wood first emerged when he was still at school. In 1931, aged just 17, he wrote a piece for the Swansea Grammar magazine. It included a short dramatic scene between Mussolini and his wife:
MUSSOLINI: Is nothing in this place ever right?
WIFE (complacently): No dear. I hope you remembered to change your underclothing.
MUSSOLINI: I did. And to air my shirt. And do my teeth. And wash behind my ears.
The humour and rhythm of this little scene already prefigure Under Milk Wood’s Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard and her two dead husbands (“I must put my pyjamas in the drawer marked pyjamas”).
A year later, Thomas told his Swansea friend, Bert Trick, about an idea for ‘a Welsh Ulysses’. At this point, it was a story called ‘Llareggub’, and he described it as 24 hours in ‘a mythical village in South Wales…with terraced houses with one ty bach to about five cottages, and the various characters coming out and emptying the slops and exchanging greetings and so on’.
By the mid 1930s, Thomas was starting to make a name for himself as a poet. Then, in 1938, he and new wife Caitlin moved to Laugharne, ‘the strangest town in Wales’, on the south coast of Carmarthenshire, where they rented a cottage overlooking the estuary. It wasn’t long before he was telling writer Richard Hughes: “What Laugharne really needs is a play about well-known Laugharne characters – and get them all to play themselves”.
Four years later, he presented the outline of a plot to Hughes, with the working title of ‘The Town That Was Mad’. In it, the entire population of a Welsh village are certified insane by an inspector from London, but naturally, the audience comes to understand that the village is an island of sanity; it’s the rest of the world that has lost the plot.
Thomas worked away at this play throughout the 1940s, but it never quite came right. The solution proved to be radio. From the mid-thirties onwards, there had been a number of ‘sound pictures’ on BBC radio which took the form of community portraits. And in Cardiff, a BBC radio features producer, T Rowland Hughes, had made a number of such programmes depicting Welsh communities through interview, song, actuality and dramatic reconstructions. This hybrid form appealed to Thomas, who was by this time well-established as a BBC radio writer and broadcaster. At one point, he proposed that a group of Welsh writers should prepare a verse-report of their own town or village. But this project never materialised.
However, Thomas went on to write his own radio verse-report of New Quay, West Wales, where he was living by the mid 1940s. ‘Quite Early One Morning’ describes moving through the sleeping streets of the town, just before dawn. It was first broadcast in December 1944 and many of its phrases, images and rhythms will later be redeployed in Under Milk Wood. It opens:
“Quite early one morning in the winter in Wales, by the sea that was lying down still and green as grass after a night of tar-black howling and rolling, I went out of the house, where I had come to stay for a cold unseasonable holiday, to see if it was raining still, if the outhouse had been blown away, potatoes, shears, rat-killer, shrimp-nets and tins of rusty nails aloft on the wind, and if all the cliffs were left.”
And we also find prototypes of Under Milk Wood characters here: of Reverend Eli Jenkins, Captain Cat and Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard: “And before you let the sun in, mind he wipes his shoes”.
Other BBC radio commissions helped Thomas to hone his craft. In 1946, he broadcast ‘The Londoner’, the story of 24 hours in the life of a post-war London family, told through a narrator and competing voices, with scenes and characters that clearly anticipate Under Milk Wood. And in 1947, his radio play ‘Return Journey’ movingly charted a walk through his blitzed and battered home town of Swansea.
Finally, in October 1953, Thomas delivered the completed script of Under Milk Wood to the BBC’s Douglas Cleverdon. Once copies had been made, the original was returned to Thomas, who promptly lost it, just before he departed for America. The enterprising Cleverdon tracked it down to a pub in Soho.
Under Milk Wood was performed later that month as a stage play at the Poetry Center New York, but Thomas by then was already worryingly ill. He collapsed in the early hours of the 5th November and died a few days later on 9th November 1953 at St Vincent’s Hospital, New York from a severe lung infection.
Following the first radio broadcast in January 1954, the play was published in book form. 13,000 copies were sold in the first month, 53,000 in the first year. Alongside his poem ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’, it arguably remains the defining work of Thomas’ career.
To mark the 70th anniversary of this extraordinary broadcast, BBC Radio 3 has commissioned five writers from across Wales to write dramatic portraits of their particular part of Wales in 2024. As in the original, these pieces together trace the course of a single day, but here we fly from Swansea in South Wales to the North Wales coast, from New Quay in Ceredigion, to Cardiff and the Rhondda. The writers are Joe Dunthorne, Manon Steffan Ros, Menna Elfyn, Hanan Issa and Rachel Trezise, and the cast is drawn from all corners of Wales, led by Ruth Jones, who plays the First Voice narrator, linking all five pieces together.
Under Milk Woods is broadcast across the week of 22nd-26th January as individual short pieces at 22.45 each evening, and as an omnibus edition on Sunday 28th January at 7.30pm, BBC Radio 3. BBC Radio 3 - Under Milk Woods
Emma Harding is the director and producer of Under Milk Woods. She is also the author of a recent novel, The Berliners (John Murray).