Under Milkwood

Olivier Theatre, NT. June 16, 2021

The play for voices is the first night back in the National Theatre’s biggest stage, the Olivier.

I first read this in English Lit as a teen and I adored it. The language. The attention to detail. The revelling in the magical mundane lives of the residents and of Milkwood for one day, from dawn till dusk. It’s an assault on the senses.

This play proves the power of words to transport and transform.

You can see and feel mythical Milkwood with its little sailors cottages and cobbled streets; where women gossip, lovers long for each other and memories mingle.

This is reimagined for the stage. It’s is told as a story from a son (shades of Thomas the alcoholic writer) to his father who has Alzheimer’s and is in a care-home.

The son is trying to connect with the older man, to spark a memory. So he creates the stories of Milkwood using his fathers’s photo album.

The fellow residents of the care-home become the residents of Milkwood.

The whole thing radiates warmth and a gentle rhythm of a time gone by. And the additional structure doesn’t get in the way of Thomas’s words. The language remains rich and melodic with the welsh voices led by Michael Sheen.

He is centre stage with barely a break for the whole 2 hours and narrates the whole thing. Magnificent the feat.

I was transported. I love this play.

I also very much enjoyed the older cast bringing Milkwood to life. There’s something comforting about it.

Special shout out to Sian Phillips as Polly Garter and the brilliant Karl Johnson as the father trying to get back to his son.

5/5 This is one of those moments that has been written in the stars for years. Sheen to speak Dylan Thomas’s immortal words on the NT stage. They’ll talk about this for years to come.