I loved it like I love breathing

· By Colin Thomas

UNDER MILK WOOD
By Dylan Thomas
Directed by Sarah Rodgers
A Theatre at UBC production.
6354 Crescent Road at UBC, to Oct. 2
Tickets: $10 to $18, call 604-822-2678
www.theatre.ubc.ca

I loved it like I love breathing.

A refrain runs through Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood: "Time passes. Listen. Time passes." These three short sentences are an invocation, a Christian prayer, a Zen instruction, a reminder for us to notice the overwhelmingly sensual beauty of the present moment. Thomas's words are the bells that call us to meditation. Try saying this out loud: "the slow, black, crowblack, fishboat-bobbing sea".

In Under Milk Wood, which Thomas wrote in 1953, the year of his death, his poetry licks every glittering and grimy surface in the imaginary Welsh seaside town of Llareggub, which is buggerall spelled backward.

The town's inhabitants are more than archetypal; they embody pure vitality, which means they're hilariously eccentric and gloriously sexual. The meek Mr. Pugh defers to his harpy wife while reading Lives of the Great Poisoners. Mooning over Sinbad Sailors, the pub owner, who might be considered beneath her station, the delectable young schoolteacher Gossamer Beynon declares: "I don't care if he does drop his aitches, so long as he's all cucumber and hooves." It's death, of course, that makes mortal experience precious, and death is a constant companion in Llareggub. Old Captain Cat had a sea life that was "sardined with women", but he gave his heart only to a fancy woman named Rosie Probert, who speaks to him from her grave: "Remember her/She is forgetting/ The earth which filled her mouth is vanishing from her." Thomas wrote Under Milk Wood for radio, but

director Sarah Rodgers and her student cast deliver a production so vividly three-dimensional that when they're mentioned you can almost smell the mingling scents of seaweed and breakfast. Rodgers has taken the text Thomas assigned to characters he called First Voice and Second Voice and divided it among her performers, providing greater aural and visual variety. And she moves the cast about the stage like an accomplished choreographer. Girls pursue and capture a boy because he won't kiss one of them; Rodgers suspends them all in a tableau and the picture looks as if Dionysus is about to be dismembered by the Furies. Throughout, characters appear from and disappear into low structures made of weathered wooden slats, rounded boxes that look like lobster traps but that double as graves and beds in Izzy Rubin's clever design.

And the performers, the graduating BFA acting class, embrace the text with gusto, physicalizing their characters with wit and nuance. I especially enjoyed Anastasia Filipczuk, who commits to every persona she adopts with a charismatic combination of humility and originality. Her Gossamer Beynon is a sex kitten frightened by her own desires, and her 85-year-old Mary Ann Sailors is a brass trumpet of octogenarian joy. Especially nice work as well from Torrance Coombs, who plays the charmingly drunk Cherry Owen; Ian Harmon as the gleeful sinner Nogood Boyo; and Astrid Varnes as lethally tidy Mrs. Ogmore-Pritchard.

It's not often that sheer beauty brings tears to my eyes in the theatre. If there is a God, Rodgers should be standing on the brink of a stellar career.

This article printed from The Straight.