education pre production overcoats. mrs cherry owens recounts her husband’s previous night’s...

UNDER MILK WOOD Sydney Theatre Company Education Resources 2012 © Copyright protects this Education Resource. Except for purposes permitted by the Copyright Act, reproduction by whatever means is prohibited. However, limited photocopying for classroom use only is permitted by educational institutions.

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KEY

PRE‐PRODUCTION RESOURCES

About Sydney Theatre Company 2

About STC Ed 2

Creative Team and Cast 2

Themes 2

Synopsis 3‐5

Historical and social background 6‐8

Additional Resources 9

Education Resources Pre‐Production

Sydney Theatre Company presents

UNDER MILK WOOD By Dylan Thomas

llustration by Jonathan Zawada

Education Resource written by Kerreen Ely‐Harper and compiled by Education Coordinator Toni Murphy

AIM of exercise or section Extension Exercises Download and watch

Drama Exercises English Exercises Play online

PRE‐PRODUCTION EXERCISES

Disembodied Voices 10‐13

Word Play 14‐16

Written To Be Spoken 17‐18

UNDER MILK WOOD Sydney Theatre Company Pre‐Production Education Resources 2012 www.sydneytheatre.com.au/stced © Sydney Theatre Company

2

PRE‐PRODUCTION RESOURCES

ABOUT SYDNEY THEATRE COMPANY

www.sydneytheatre.com.au/about

ABOUT STCED

www.sydneytheatre.com.au/stced/about/us

CREATIVE TEAM

Director – Andrew Upton

Set Designer – Robert Cousins

Costume Designer – Tbc

Composer – Alan John

Sound Designer – Steve Francis

Associate Director – Kip Williams

Voice and Dialect Director – Charmian Gradwell

CAST

Paula Arundell

Drew Forsythe

Cameron Goodall

Sandy Gore

Alan John

Drew Livingston

Bruce Spence

Jack Thompson

Helen Thomson

THEMES

Language & Voice

Radio Drama

Poetry

FIRST VOICE

From where you are, you can

hear their dreams.

Under Milk Wood

“

”


2

SYNOPSIS

Night

FIRST VOICE tells us to be quiet and listen to the dreams of the townsfolk of the mythical Welsh

village, Llareggub. Taking it in turns FIRST and SECOND VOICE narrate ‘the eyes and secrets’ of

the town’s dreamers in ‘streets rocked to sleep by the sea’.

Second Voice introduces FIRST DROWNED and CAPTAIN CAT, a blind sea Captain. The voices of

the dead of the sea rise up to ask him ‘how is it above?’ Lovers MYFANWY PRICE and MOG

EDWARDS call to each other in longing for their wedding day. EVANS the undertaker laughs in

his sleep. MR WALDO’s dream of his mother is interrupted by his screaming wife and the gossip

of neighbours. MRS OGMORE‐PRITCHARD widower of both MR OGMORE and MR PRITCHARD

wakes in her dream to give instructions to her dead husbands. GOSSAMER BEYNON, school

teacher and the Butcher’s daughter dreams of ‘a small rough ready man’ who gives her a wink.

ORGAN MORGAN, the organist, cries in his dream for the music he can hear in Coronation

Street. Cocklers, MR and MRS FLOYD, remain quietly asleep ‘like two old kippers in a box’. MR

UTAH WATKINS counts sheep, smiling and knitting. OCKY MILKMAN empties his milk churns

into the Dewi River. Next door CHERRY OWEN drinks a fish. P.C.ATTILA gets out of bed too

early. The postman WILLY NILLY sleep walks up the street and knocks on MRS WILLY NILLY’S

door. She pleads him not to spank her. But he does so every night. More dreamers and their

dreams come to life ‐ SINBAD SAILOR, LILY SMALLS, MAE ROSE COTTAGE and snoring BESSIE

BIGHEAD. The Inspectors of Cruelty fly into MRS BUTCHER BEYNON’S dream to prosecute her

husband for selling dubious meat products. REV. ELI JENKINS, poet and preacher dreams of

reciting Eisteddfodua verse. School Master, MR PUGH dreams of murdering his wife. MARY

ANN SAILORS dreams of the Garden of Eden. Down the garden path ‘past beanrows and onion‐

bed and tomatoes’ she sits and shells peas on her lap. In Donkey Street DAI BREAD, POLLY

GARTER, NOGOOD BOYO, and LORD CUT‐GLASS dream of harems, babies, ticking clocks and

nothing at all.

Dawn

FIRST VOICE tells us to stand on Llareggub Hill. From here we can see the town below sleeping.


3

The VOICE OF A GUIDE BOOK leads us around the streets, lanes and nearby farms.

Morning

A cock crows. CAPTAIN CAT pulls the get‐out‐of‐bed bell. REV.ELI JENKINS recites his morning

service verse for the new day. LILY SMALLS wakes puts on the kettle and looking at her self in

the mirror laments nobody loves her. MRS BEYON becomes impatient and calls for her tea. MR.

and MRS PUGH exchange murderous pleasantries. Looking out their window the PUGH’S gossip

nastily about their neighbours who have begun their business for the day. P.C. ATTILA stamps

out of Handcuff House. MARY ANN SAILORS calls to the heavens her age. ORGAN MORGAN

plays his music. DAI BREAD is hurrying to the bakery. MRS DAI BREAD asks neighbour MRS

SARAH if she can spare a loaf of bread and asks after her boils. MRS DAI BREAD TWO lights up

her pipe. LORD CUT‐GLASS runs out of his house to empty his slops bucket. NOGOOD BOYO

declares he’s ‘up to no good in the wash‐house’. MISS MYFANWY PRICE eats a delicious

breakfast of egg, toast, butter and home‐made plum jam. POLLY GARTER breastfeeds her baby

under the washing line, wondering where her babies’ fathers are.

The dreamers now awake eat breakfast – black brackish tea, cocoa, sea‐fry, onions boiled in

their overcoats. MRS CHERRY OWENS recounts her husband’s previous night’s drunken revelry

of song and dance. BUTCHER BEYNON teases his wife about their fried breakfast being the

cat’s liver. LILY SMALL accuses him of being the biggest liar in town. The Sailors arms pub has

opened and SINBAD SAILORS draws a pint. The school bell rings and children are wiped, picked,

scrubbed and shrilled off to school. People head off to work. MR EDWARDS whispers he loves

MYFANWY PRICE. CAPTAIN CAT names the children he can hear but can’t see as they pass by.

He listens intently as WILLY NILLY delivers and reads the post to MRS OGMORE‐PRITCHARD,

MRS PUGH, MR EDWARDS and MR WALDO.

People are moving up and down the street. The women gossip about the townspeople as they

gather at MRS ORGAN MORGAN’S general store. WILLY NILLY and his wife steam open a love

letter from MOG EDWARDS to MYFANWY PRICE. MOG fears if his tailoring business does not

improve he’ll end up in the workhouse. FISHERMAN declares it’s too rough for fishing and

heads toward the Sailors Arms. The school bell announces the children who scamper into the


4

school yard singing their song. CAPTAIN CAT sings along, as do the vegetables and town dogs.

MRS DAI BREAD TWO swindles MRS DAI BREAD ONE out of her housekeeping money with an

elaborate crystal ball fortune tale that is interrupted by cloud cover. REV. ELI JENKINS on his

morning round of calls, stops to listen to POLLY GARTER sing as she scrubs the floors of the

Mothers’ Union Dance. SINBAD SAILORS declares his love for GOSSAMER BEYNON. And she for

him, even if he ‘drops his aitches’.

Morning school is over and the children play. GWENNIE calls the boys to kiss her ‘where she

says or give her a penny.’ THIRD BOY who fails to kiss her because his mother says he mustn’t is

chased downhill by a shrill of giggling girls, his pants falling down and burning with bruises.

Mr PUGH now fantasizes about poisoning his wife. MRS ORGAN‐MORGAN gossips about Polly

Garter with her husband who has not been listening to a word she’s said. She chastises him for

only being interested in his organ music. LORD CUT‐GLASS listens to his kitchen full of sixty‐five

clocks ticking. POLLY GARTER bemoans her dead lovers.

Afternoon

CAPTAIN CAT weeps for his lost love, ROSIE PROBERT. They share a duet and she asks him to

remember her, because she has forgotten him. A mother and CHILD see him crying. NOGOOD

BOYO fishes and dreams of MRS DAI BREAD TWO and a bowing GEISHA girl.

MAE ROSE COTTAGE lazily blows a puff ball reciting ‘he loves me, he loves me not’. REV.ELI

JENKINS is writing his life’s work – the White Book of Llareggub – on the history of the town. It

is milking time on farmer UTAH WATKINS dairy. He rants and raves about the cows he can’t

control. His milkmaid BESSIE BIGHEAD takes a gentler approach. MRS OGMORE‐PRITCHARD

wills herself to sleep. The night approaching the ghosts of her husbands slip through the

keyhole and into her house. MAE ROSE COTTAGE waits for love in the clover. As sunset

approaches the REV.ELI JENKINS recites a poem saying goodbye to the day and gives his

blessing to the night. JACK BLACK prepares to meet with Satan in the Wood. LILY SMALLS and

NOGOD BOYO rendezvous in the washroom. CHERRY OWEN heads to the Sailors Arms for a

drink. SINBAD calls for Gossamer Beynon.


5

Night

The dead rush back to the sea, and the sandman is coming. The young women dance and the

young men wolf whistle. A drunk MR WALDO sings. CAPTAIN CAT sees his drowned ship‐

mates. ORGAN‐MORGAN mistakes a drunk CHERRY OWEN who is lying on a tombstone for

Johann Sebastian Bach. MOG EDWARDS and MYFANWY PRICE write their every night love

letters to each other before going to sleep. MR WALDO meets his beloved POLLY GARTER in the

dusky wood. The night descends and the good people of Llareggub return to their dreaming.

Consider

Llareggub – spells ‘bugger all’ backwards

Dreams represent your primal instincts

We spend a third of our lives asleep


6

HISTORICAL AND SOCIAL BACKGROUND OF THE PLAY

Dylan Thomas 1914‐1953

Dylan Thomas was a slob. He was a dreadful man, absolutely terrible, … I think what increasingly interests people, and I know what interests students, is this big difference between, if you like, the man and the work. Now, he was a terrible man and he wrote, I think, rather good and occasionally great poetry. J A Davies

Dylan Maralais Thomas was born in Swansea, a coastal town in Wales, 1914 and died a few

days after his thirty‐ninth birthday in New York. A poet and an alcoholic, he is believed to have

said when dying, “ After 39 years, this is all I’ve done”.

The son of an English teacher Thomas began writing poetry as a small child. After leaving school

he became a reporter for the South Wales Evening Post. He was twenty years old when his first

volume of verse Eighteen Poems was published. Moving to London he worked as a journalist for

the BBC. In 1936 he married Caitlin Macnamara and published his next book Twenty Five

Poems. He and Caitlin moved to Laugharne in Carmarthenshire, South West Wales. An

asthmatic he was deemed unfit to serve in the Second World War. In 1940 Portrait of the Artist

as a Young Dog, a collection of short stories, received critical acclaim. In 1946 another book of

poems, Deaths and Entrances was published. Thomas’s readings and recordings of his own

work became very popular. Brandon Kershner commented that Thomas ‘became the wild man

from the West, the Celtic bard with the magical rant, a folk figure with racial access to roots of

experience which more civilized Londoners lacked.’

Thomas’s writing drew upon the Romantic, Celtic and French Symbolist poetic traditions. He

was a great admirer of John Donne, the early nineteenth century poets, William Blake, John

Keats, and William Wordsworth, and the Welsh born poet George Herbert. He read the French

Symbolists – Rimbaud, Nerval, Verlaine, Baudelaire. And was most certainly influenced by

James Joyce. A lover of the cinema from his childhood he would write documentary screen

plays as well as a number of unproduced feature fiction films.


7

Under Milk Wood’s first iteration was as a story Quiet Early One Morning broadcast on BBC

radio. Raymond Williams, in Dylan Thomas: A Collection of Critical Essays (1966) said that Under

Milk Wood is ‘not a mature work, but the retained extravagance of an adolescent's imaginings.

Yet it moves, at its best, into a genuine involvement, an actual sharing of experience, which is

not the least of its dramatic virtues.’ Thomas read the play as a solo performance at Harvard

University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, on May 3, 1953. By this stage his health was

progressively deteriorating through heavy drinking and morphine use. On 9th November 1953,

after an infamous drinking binge in New York’s White Horse Pub he died of pneumonia

complications.

Consider

Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and

history only the particular.

Aristotle

I`m a reader, you know. I was corrupted by Faust. And Shakespeare. And Proust. And

Hemingway. But mostly I was corrupted by Dylan Thomas.

Richard Burton

A good poem is a contribution to reality. The world is never the same once a good poem has

been added to it. A good poem helps to change the shape of the universe, helps to extend

everyone's knowledge of himself and the world around him.

Dylan Thomas

References:

Brandon Kershner, Dylan Thomas: The Poet and his Critics, 1977

Raymond Williams, Dylan Thomas: A Collection of Critical Essays, 1966


8

Dylans’ Poems

Do not go gentle into that good night Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right, Because their words had forked no lightning they Do not go gentle into that good night. Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay, Rage, rage against the dying of the light. Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight, And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way, Do not go gentle into that good night. Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay, Rage, rage against the dying of the light. And you, my father, there on the sad height, Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray. Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Clown In The Moon

My tears are like the quiet drift Of petals from some magic rose; And all my grief flows from the rift Of unremembered skies and snows. I think, that if I touched the earth, It would crumble; It is so sad and beautiful, So tremulously like a dream.

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Highlight key imagery.

How does Thomas create rhythm and momentum through his use of words and poetic devices?

Find & List examples of his use of:

Rhyme

Verbal Puns

Repetition

Catalogue Lists

Assonance – a vowel rhyme, as in ‘seas of their dreams’

Alliteration ‐ repetition of the beginning sounds of words, as in ‘hear the houses’

Extension:

Choose a short excerpt from the Under Milk Wood text you would describe as ‘difficult’. For

example, Rev.Eli Jenkins ‘Dear Gwalia!’ verse.

(Listen to Richard Burton’s rendition, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JgMRD84MTQY )

Read & Discuss possible meanings and interpretations of the text.

Complete these lines written by Thomas in the loose verse style of Under Milk Wood.

Years and years ago, when I was a boy

………………………………………………………….

There was no fire to be seen, only clouds of smoke

…………………………………………………………………………….

Rage, rage against the dying of the light

……………………………………………………………………………. I think, that if I touched the earth

…………………………………………………………………………..

Listen. It is night moving in the streets

………………………………………………………………………………..

Remember last night?

………………………………………………………………………..

Every Saturday

……………………………………………………………………

And she burst into tears

…………………………………………………………………….

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street/suburb.

Add 5 Sounds

Add 5 Colours

Add 5 Characters – give them names, physical characteristics, relationships, behaviours

Develop into a short scene, poem, radio play, film script.

Imagine the dreams of your neighbours as they lie asleep.

Write a short piece in the style of Under Milk Wood based on your own street, suburb,

community or a place of significance you have visited or lived in.

Begin your piece with:

To begin at the beginning:

It is ………………………………

OR

From where you are, you can hear their dreams.

…………………………………………………………………………

Performance Reflection:

How important is sound in the production?

How does the production create a sense of place?

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WIFE (_Screaming_)

Waldo! Wal‐do!

MR WALDO

Yes, Blodwen love?

WIFE

Oh, what'll the neighbours say, what'll the neighbours...

Identify what techniques Thomas has used for humourous effect when introducing the

character of Mr Waldo.

Consider:

• parody

• ridicule

• caricature

• use of taboos – sexual, anti‐social behaviours

• peculiar or Illogical situations

• word play

• incongruity

• disorder

• syntax & grammar

Dreams, Dreaming & Dreamers

MOG EDWARDS I dreamed last night …

The characters of Under Milk Wood reveal their dreams to us. Within these dreams lie the

character’s deepest thoughts and desires.


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education pre production overcoats. mrs cherry owens recounts her husband’s previous night’s...

Documents