On a hot, sunny evening it could have been difficult for the
audience at Le Colombier theatre to imagine a cold, dark Welsh village, but
such was the skill of the five actors of the Dear Conjunction company that that disbelief was easily suspended
in the latest presentation from FET.
Under Milk Wood is
Dylan Thomas’s masterpiece, an evocation of a night and day in the lives of a
cast of curious characters – not all alive – in the Welsh village of Llareggub.
The piece is not a play, but a series of monologues, dialogues and descriptive
readings and the actors used accents and minimal props to keep the wonderful
language of the stories going.
Each actor played a number of parts, and one quickly came to
sympathise with the dreams, hopes and disappointments of the characters. From
Blind Captain Cat, prim Mrs Pugh to voluptuous Polly Garter the humour
(sometimes bawdy) and pathos of the characters was superbly portrayed. The
interaction of the characters sometimes made the dialogue seem like verbal ping
pong as the actors all contributed to one of Thomas’s intricate passages, with
barely a cue missed.
It would be insidious to single out any performance, but few
men in the audience could have resisted a rendezvous on Milk Wood with the
marvellous Polly Garter (Rose Romain).
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