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written and directed by Leon Pownall   

Stratford Festival, Studio Theatre, Stratford

July 13-September 11, 2010

“Sullen Art” 

“Do Not Go Gentle” is a fine showcase for the extraordinary talent of Geraint Wyn Davies but is an unsatisfying portrait of its subject, Welsh poet Dylan Thomas (1914-53).  The play was written and originally directed by well-known actor Leon Pownall (1943-2006).  It played for only three performances at Stratford in 2002, but has since had a very successful run in New York from November 2009 through January 2010.  Since Pownall’s death, Dean Gabourie has helped “realize” Pownall’s direction.  For added authenticity, Wyn Davies, like Thomas, was also born in Swansea.  

 

The action takes place in a space that combines a study with an auditorium lectern, both surrounded by scattered books and strewn papers.  Wyn Davies’ Thomas tells us very near the beginning that he’s dead, waiting, it seems, in a kind of purgatory for a final decision on his soul.  As Thomas drinks his way through a bottle of whisky, he complains about the academics that claim he had a death wish, criticizes himself as a mere organizer of words, congratulate himself on the way women threw themselves at him because he was a poet, regrets the sordid circumstances of his death in New York and claims that his wife, Caitlin Macnamara, next to his love of words, was his one true love.  The trouble is that these ramblings don’t really give us any insight into the poet other than what most people already know--that he was an alcoholic and a womanizer.  As happens more often than not with plays about artists, the minutiae of the artist’s external life really provide no insight into the artist’s creative process and especially the products of that process.  

 

The 90-minute play strangely enough includes only four poems by Thomas--”My Craft or Sullen Art”, “Fern Hill”, “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night” and “The Force That Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower”.  One might have expected more poetry beside these over-anthologized pieces.  Since the Thomas Pownall has created neither knows nor cares what he poem may mean to others, these four, though beautiful declaimed by Wyn Davies, seem to come out of nowhere, completely distinct from Thomas’s autobiographical musings.  The one clue Pownall provides is Thomas’s statement that half his poems are remembrances of childhood and half are protestations against death.  Thomas’s explanation is that he is immature and has never wanted to be mature.  He finds it fitting, in fact, that he should die at age 39.

A theme Pownall has Thomas harp on for rather too much of the show is his feelings of inferiority to Shakespeare.  One wonders why Thomas should be more afflicted with this “anxiety of influence” than any other post-Shakespearean poet.  And, indeed, if Thomas did suffer any such feelings they certainly did not block his own creativity.  The one good aspect of this theme is that it allows Wyn Davies to recite a number of key speeches from “King Lear”, “Macbeth”, “As You Like It” and “Hamlet”.  Wyn Davies speaks these speeches so masterfully that one longs to see him in the roles of Lear, Macbeth, Jacques sometime soon at the Festival.

 

This is an intimate show that needs no special effects, but, as has become typical, the Festival seem incapable of omitting them.  Behind the acting space is a painting of a green Welsh valley with clouds moving across the sky.  What’s the point since the action is not set in Wales?  This scene then fades into a portrait of Dylan Thomas and then into a portrait of Wyn Davies in the same pose, as if we were unable to figure out whom the actor was playing.  Later, when Thomas mentions snow, lighting designer Louise Guinand has specks of lights imitating falling snow slant past on the screen, as if we needed help in conjuring up the image ourselves.

 

Fans of Geraint Wyn Davies will want to see “Do Not Go Gentle” no matter what.  He is a great actor and to hear him speak Thomas and Shakespeare and relate Thomas’s childhood tales is unalloyed pleasure.  Fans of Dylan Thomas, however, will be disappointed that so few of Thomas’s poems are included and will puzzle at the show’s preoccupation with Shakespeare.  Ultimately both Dylan Thomas and Geraint Wyn Davies need a programme that will more fully display their abundant talents.  To have Wyn Davies simply read a selection of Thomas’s poetry and prose would have fit the bill. 

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: Geraint Wyn Davies. ©Andrew Eccles.