Under Milk Wood – Sydney Theatre Company

Overview

Mr Pugh reads The Lives of Great Poisoners while glaring over the dinner table at Mrs Pugh. Upright schoolteacher Gossamer Beynon longs to fall into the swarthy arms of barman Sinbad Sailors. Music-obsessed Organ Morgan sees Bach lounging around the churchyard. Polly Garter thinks only of her dear departed Willy Wee while entertaining a parade of lovers who earn her the reprobation of the town.

These are just some of the vividly named 60-plus characters you join for a day in the fishing village of Llareggub, which if you read it backwards, will tell you something about the plot. Not a lot happens in the course of one day, but you start it in these characters' dreams, and that means something when you see their trifling tragedies and victories by nightfall.

This is Under Milk Wood by poet Dylan Thomas (of Do not go gentle into that good night fame). It's great poetry without the magniloquence, perfect for the salt-of-the-earth Welsh town its evoking, full of rugged language (stamping out in a "heavy beef-red huff") and intuitive neologisms that never quite took off (night is "neddying among the snuggeries of babies"). Originally written for radio and first performed in 1954, it is a 'play for voices', completely without heed for the technicalities of staging.

Such plays are sometimes fun for the director but not for the audience, making a bumpy, obtuse ride. Fortunately, Under Milk Wood is fun for both. Director Kip Williams, the plucky young assistant director who stepped up to the plate when slated director Andrew Upton was called away on other business, has given it an amazingly magical staging that uses few accoutrements to create a lot of impact. As we careen from scene to scene, home to home, indistinct dreamspace to indistinct dreamspace, furniture and props roll in and out of view like waves. Their inbuilt tricks and trapdoors create beauty, surprise, and sight gags in spades.

Similarly chameleon-like are the cast, a roll call of Australian talent spanning generations. It's woven together by Jack Thompson and Sandy Gore's narration, while Paula Arundell, Helen Thomson, Bruce Spence, Drew Forsythe, Cameron Goodall, Drew Livingston, Alan John and two alternating boys, Ky Baldwin and Alex Chorley, conjure full scenes in seconds. They all play outside gender and age; the kid makes a sweet 85-year-old woman.

However, for all that, Under Milk Wood doesn't quite feel alive. It's hard to make it anything but a bit twee and old-timey, a nice treat for the set who yearn to be transported to a quaint Welsh past and the days when Jack Thompson was Cleo centrefold material. "He can read me a bedtime story anytime, if you know what I mean," is what I imagine your mother will say to you after you take her on this little lark.