DIRECTOR'S NOTES:

Dylan Thomas is remembered most for his final play Under Milk Wood set in a small Welsh village called Llareggub ( bugger all spelled backwards) written in 1953, the year of his death. He completed the play minutes be fore its first public performance in New York. I find this a deeply human piece. Throughout rehearsal these characters and the honest and lusty way that they embrace their day has made me laugh and cry. At times I am saddened as I watch a picture unfold of a life that doesn't go on today. It is a picture of a certain time and yet it is of all human time. Although we don' t come from Wales and we are living in the third millennium we know all these people and recognize their dreams and despairs. Dylan Thomas' wife Caitlin observed that " Dylan loved the world and all the people in it." This is evident in his most loving, truthful, lusty look at what it is like to be alive. ~ Sarah Rodgers

PRESS RELEASE:

Under Milk Wood, Dylan Thomas’s last work and only play, opens the season for Theatre at UBC. Thomas introduces the colourful townsfolk of Llareggub through their dreams as he examines powerful forces that operate beneath the calm exterior of a town which as “fallen head over bells in love.” Under Milk Wood previews on Wednesday, September 22, opens on Thursday, September 23 and continues Monday to Friday until October 2. All performances are at 7:30 p.m. at the Frederic Wood Theatre, Crescent Road at Main Mall on the campus of the University of British Columbia.

Under Milk Wood was commissioned by the BBC who in 1963 recorded it as “play for voices” with narration by another famous Welshman, Richard Burton, who claimed “the entire thing is about religion, the idea of death and sex.” These themes are central to the lives of the colourful characters described with great fondness by the author. Like his poetry, it relies on the clang of its lines and the pictures evoked by its words to communicate its meaning. The town has its own personality which is divided along Freudian lines in to a conscious world of daily activity narrated by the first voice and a subconscious world of intimate thoughts revealed by the second voice. The multitude of anecdotes interwoven in a masterful fashion and written in a lyrical, evocative language, creates an enduring portrayal of the place and the people.

On the creative team are stage director and UBC alumna, Sarah Rodgers; guest musical director Karin Konoval; and four BFA candidate designers: Isabelle Rubin (set design), Nicola Waterfield (lighting design), Nicole Chartrand (costume design) and Michelle Harrison (sound design). The cast, in multiple roles, includes: Ryan Beil, Ruth Brown, Niki Brown, Tory Coombs, Kerry Duff, Anastasia Filipczuk, Ian Harmon. Johannah Khalema, Chris Murray and Astrid Varnes.

Under Milk Wood is the first production in the 2004-2005 Theatre at UBC season and is produced by the Department of Theatre, Film and Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia.

DYLAN ON HIS LOVE OF LANGUAGE:

The first poems I knew were nursery rhymes, and before I could read them for myself I had come to love just the words of them, the words alone. What the words stood for, symbolized, or meant was of very secondary importance -- what mattered was the very sound of them as I heard them for the first time on the lips of the remote and quite incomprehensible grownups who seemed, for some reason, to be living in my world. And those words were, to me, as the notes of bells, the sounds of musical instruments, the noises of wind, sea, and rain, the rattle of milkcarts, the clapping of hooves on cobbles, the fingering of branches on a window pane, might be to someone deaf from birth, who has miraculously found his hearing.