Reviews 2004
Reviews 2004
✭✭✭✭✩
by Dylan Thomas, directed by Douglas Campbell
Wax Poetic Productions, Mercury Theatre, St. Marys
May 14-June 6, 2004
"Waking and Dreaming in St. Marys"
St Marys’ new performance space, the Mercury Theatre at 14 Church Street North, has been inaugurated in high style with a performance of Dylan Thomas’s “Under Milk Wood” directed by well-known Stratford actor Douglas Campbell. It is an imaginative production that brings Thomas’s portrait of the waking and dreaming lives of a small town in Wales to zestful life.
“Under Milk Wood” is subtitled “A Play for Voices”. It was originally written as a radio play and first broadcast in 1954. Radio is, in fact, the perfect medium for the play that shifts through the imaginings and mostly unspoken thoughts of 53 characters in the small town of Llaregyb. Bringing Thomas’s highly charged, evocative poetry to the stage can risk losing the fluidity and mystery of the original.
Campbell overcomes this by making the mechanics of staging the play visible. Actors, seemingly in their street clothes, mill about the playing area until called on by stage manager, Robert Pel, to begin. Five lecterns, three on the downstairs area, one on the house left staircase and one in the second level of the stage, hold the scripts that the First and Second Voices, the main narrators of the action, read from as they move about the playing area. The stage itself is a raised circular dais that the actors walk around as much as play on. Hanging from the stage balcony are iridescent blue curtains that reveal scenes when illumined from behind. They seem to represent the haze of alcohol, dreams and the sea. Campbell has ensured that the transitions from narration to acting and from character to character are swift, seamless and magical. He closes the show with a choral version of Reverend Jenkins’ morning poem that aptly concludes, “And to the sun we all will bow And say goodbye--but just for now!”
With only six actors playing the 53 roles, the theme of transformation in general becomes related to the ability of actors to transform themselves. Stratford actor Richard Curnock plays the First Voice and former Stratford Festival Artistic Director David William plays the Second Voice, the warmth and gusto of Curnock nicely contrasting with the coolness and restraint of William. Among Curnock’s three other roles, the most important is blind Captain Cat, who movingly still mourns Rosy Probert, the only woman he ever loved. Among William’s eight other roles, the ever optimistic Reverend Eli Jenkins and the poetic love-letter writer Mog Edwards stand out as does the servile, henpecked Mr. Pugh, whose secret revenge is to nurture fantasies of poisoning his wife.
Marion Day plays nine strong women, among them the sensuous, dying Rosie Probert, Myfanwy Price who passionately corresponds with Mog Edwards and, most hilariously, the strict, cleanliness-obsessed Mrs. Ogmore-Pritchard. Among her ten roles Philippa Domville is bitingly funny as the horribly mean Mrs. Pugh, earthy as Mrs. Cherry Owen, dreamy as Mae Rose Cottage and sings Polly Garter’s song about Willy Wee, her own dead love, with great feeling. David Kirby also plays ten roles, many of them the male partners of Domville’s characters. The matter-of-fact nosiness of his postman Willy Nilly, who reads everyone’s mail, is priceless as is the jolliness of Butcher Beynon, who teases his wife about the stray animals or people who may have found their way into their dinner, and he brings unexpected pathos to the town rake Nogood Boyo. Anika Johnson, still a high school student, rounds out the cast with six roles.
“Under Milk Wood” is a beautiful play that portrays the interplay of dualities in the everyday, from life and death to waking and dreaming, restraint and passion, togetherness and loneliness. Campbell has made this celebration of life into a celebration of the theatre and its power of transformation. The new Mercury Theatre has only 72 seats. Seldom will you find so much talent and so much poetry in so small a space. The Mercury Theatre is off to a very auspicious start.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: David William. ©1990 Elisabeth Feryn.
2004-05-28
Under Milk Wood