Book Review – Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas
A Play For Voices that is Pretty but, Ultimately, Pointless
If a reader has never read any of Dylan Thomas’s poetry and is hoping to get into both drama and Thomas through Under Milk Wood (New Directions Publishing Company, ISBN: 0811202097, 1954), they will find themselves sorely disappointed. Whereas Thomas’s poetry provokes thought and emotion through its simplicity, sadness, and pure depression – much in the same way that the work of Sylvia Plath, Pablo Neruda, and Morrissey operates – his play for voices translates poorly to the page.
A Play For Voices
Under Milk Wood is formatted as a script without stage cues, intended to be read on a radio program as a monologue. While it may be unfair to judge the work as it is on the page and not as a performance, the ideas expressed remain the same and in visualizing the performance lays a few problems.
A Meandering Cast of Characters
The 95 page book takes just as many pages to start, with the only redeeming and forward moving action coming at the very end. There wasn’t even an abundance of sadness as was to be expected from Thomas’s poetry. Even if a reader can handle a complete lack of movement within a story as long as it is depressing (Jim Jarmusch’s films, the music of Swans), Under Milk Wood is too meandering.
The humor seems out of place as the characters run into each other and say awkward, melodramatic things. While a play for voices would be a good opportunity to use non-physical humor, Thomas opts for silliness, creating humor that is only relatively funny. A few chuckles here and there, but not enough to consider this a comedy.
The Work on the Page
To focus on the piece as a work on the page means that there is no narrative to fall back on in trying to maintain emotion in the characters. As a story told completely in dialogue, it succeeds in being a very detailed character study and it even sets up enough loose ends and possible connections for a novel.
However, the play takes place over the course of one day, and it comes off as being just a day. Just another day. When it ended – the day and the play – the anticipation of what would happen next was left unfulfilled.
Perhaps that’s where the sadness comes in. These characters are dealing with ghosts in their dreams and their own limitations (the unrefinement of Nogood Boyo, the heartbreak of Polly Garter, the stationary reverie of Captain Cat) on a daily basis.
That said, there still needs to be something that happens. Life doesn’t always happen in the grand sweep. In fact, it usually happens in the long lulls. To defend this play is a difficult task, however. The language is fantastic and Dylan uses his poetic creativity to paint a pretty picture, but at the end it all ends up being for nothing.
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Under Milk Wood, Dylan Thomas
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