Under Milkwood Spring 2011

Under Milk Wood
by Dylan Thomas

Reservations & Times

Victoria Hall Seating

Dramatis Personae, Westmount's Community Theatre, invites you to Under Milk Wood, a humorous and earthy play which takes place in a tiny fishing village in Wales. Over a night and a day we meet an odd assortment of characters, see their dreams and their every day "hullaballoo" in their little town of Llareggub.

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Picture Gallery

Article In Westmount Examiner

1. Introduction

To begin at the beginning
It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobblestreets silent and the hunched, courters'-and-rabbits' wood limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboatbobbing sea. The houses are blind as moles (though moles see fine to-night in the snouting, velvet dingles) or blind as Captain Cat there in the muffled middle by the pump and the town clock, the shops in mourning, the Welfare Hall in widows' weeds. And all the people of the lulled and dumbfound town are sleeping now.

2. Captain Cat Dream Scene

Remember me, Captain?
You're Dancing Williams!
I lost my step in Nantucket.

3. Miss Price Dream Scene

I am a draper mad with love. I love you more than all the flannelette and calico, candlewick, dimity, crash and merino, tussore, cretonne, crepon, muslin, poplin, ticking and twill in the whole Cloth Hall of the world.

4. Clothes Line Dream Scene

What she puts up with
Never should of married
If she didn't had to
Same as her mother
There's a husband for you
Bad as his father
And you know where he ended

5. Mrs Ogmore-Prichard’s Dream Scene

Soon it will be time to get up. Tell me your tasks, in order.
I must put my pyjamas in the drawer marked pyjamas.
I must take my cold bath which is good for me.
I must wear my flannel band to ward off sciatica.
I must dress behind the curtain and put on my apron.
I must blow my nose.
In the garden, if you please.

6. Laughing Dream Scene

Gossamer Beynon, daughter, schoolteacher, dreaming deep, daintily ferrets under a fluttering hummock of chicken's feathers in a slaughterhouse that has chintz curtains and a three-pieced suite, and finds, with no surprise, a small rough ready man with a bushy tail winking in a paper carrier.
At last, my love,
sighs Gossamer Beynon. And the bushy tail wags rude and ginger.

7. Tour Guide Scene

Less than five hundred souls inhabit the three quaint streets and the few narrow by-lanes and scattered farmsteads that constitute this small, decaying watering-place which may, indeed, be called a 'backwater of life' without disrespect to its natives who possess, to this day, a salty individuality of their own.

8.The Reverend Eli Jenkin's Morning Poem

A tiny dingle is Milk Wood
By Golden Grove 'neath Grongar,
But let me choose and oh! I should
Love all my life and longer
To stroll among our trees and stray
In Goosegog Lane, on Donkey Down,
And hear the Dewi sing all day,
And never, never leave the town.

9. Lily Small's Scene

Oh there's a face!
Where you get that hair from?
Got it from a old tom cat.
Give it back then, love.

10. Mr & Mrs Pugh Breakfast Tea Scene

Here's your arsenic, dear.
And your weedkiller biscuit.
I've throttled your parakeet.
I've spat in the vases.
I've put cheese in the mouseholes.

11. Mrs Dai Bread One And Two Morning Scene

Me, Dai Bread, hurrying to the bakery, pushing in my shirt-tails, buttoning my waistcoat, ping goes a button, why can't they sew them, no time for breakfast, nothing for breakfast, there's wives for you.

12. Breakfast Scene

Now frying-pans spit, kettles and cats purr in the kitchen. The town smells of seaweed and breakfast all the way down from Bay View, where Mrs OgmorePritchard, in smock and turban, big-besomed to engage the dust, picks at her starchless bread and sips lemon-rind tea, to Bottom Cottage, where Mr Waldo, in bowler and bib, gobbles his bubble-and-squeak and kippers and swigs from the saucebottle.

13. Mr & Mrs Cherry Owen Morning Scene

Remember last night? In you reeled, my boy, as drunk as a deacon with a big wet bucket and a fish-frail full of stout and you looked at me and you said, 'God has come home!' you said, and then over the bucket you went, sprawling and bawling, and the floor was all flagons and eels

14. Butcher Beynon Breakfast Scene

From Beynon Butchers in Coronation Street, the smell of fried liver sidles out with onions on its breath. And listen! In the dark breakfast-room behind the shop, Mr and Mrs Beynon, waited upon by their treasure, enjoy, between bites, their everymorning hullabaloo, and Mrs Beynon slips the gristly bits under the tasselled tablecloth to her fat cat.

15. Willy Nilly Postman Deliveries

Here's a letter for you with stamped and addressed envelope enclosed, all the way from Builth Wells. A gentleman wants to study birds and can he have accommodation for two weeks and a bath vegetarian.

16. Gossiping in Mrs Organ Morgan's Store

and he got a little telescope to look at birds
Willy Nilly said
Remember her first husband? He didn't need a telescope
he looked at them undressing through the keyhole

17. Mog Edward's Letter Reading

Mrs Willy Nilly steams open Mr Mog Edwards' letter to Miss Myfanwy Price and reads it aloud to Willy Nilly by the squint of the Spring sun through the one sealed window running with tears, while the drugged, bedraggled hens at the back door whimper and snivel for the lickerish bog-black tea.

18. Mrs Dai Bread(s) Fortune Telling

I see a featherbed. With three pillows on it. And a text above the bed. I can't read what it says, there's great clouds blowing. Now they have blown away. God is Love, the text says.

19. Street Scene

The morning is all singing.

20. Polly Garter Song

I loved a man whose name was Tom
He was strong as a bear and two yards long
I loved a man whose name was Dick
He was big as a barrel and three feet thick
And I loved a man whose name was Harry
Six feet tall and sweet as a cherry
But the one I loved best awake or asleep
Was little Willy Wee and he’s six feet deep.

21. Men At The Sailor's Arms Morning

Oh, beautiful beautiful Gossamer B, I wish I wish that you were for me. I wish you were not so educated.

22. Mr & Mrs Pugh at Lunch

In the blind-drawn dark dining-room of School House, dusty and echoing as a dining-room in a vault, Mr and Mrs Pugh are silent over cold grey cottage pie. Mr Pugh reads, as he forks the shroud meat in, from Lives of the Great Poisoners. He has bound a plain brown-paper cover round the book. Slyly, between slow mouthfuls, he sidespies up at Mrs Pugh, poisons her with his eye, then goes onreading. He underlines certain passages and smiles in secret.

23. Mrs Organ Morgan at Lunch

And when you think of all those babies she's got, then all I can say is she'd better give up bird nesting that's all I can say, it isn't the right kind of hobby at all for a woman that can't say No even to midgets. Remember Bob Spit? He wasn't any bigger than a baby and he gave her two. But they're two nice boys, I will say that, Fred Spit and Arthur. Sometimes I like Fred best and sometimes I like Arthur. Who do you like best, Organ?

24. Sunny Slow Lulling Afternoon

Pigs grunt in a wet wallow-bath, and smile as they snort and dream. They dream of the acorned swill of the world, the rooting for pig-fruit, the bagpipe dugs of the mother sow, the squeal and snuffle of yesses of the women pigs in rut.

25. Mr Pugh's Laboratory

Sly and silent, he foxes into his chemist's den and there, in a hiss and prussic circle of cauldrons and phials brimful with pox and the Black Death, cooks up a fricassee of deadly nightshade, nicotine, hot frog, cyanide and bat-spit for his needling stalactite hag and bednag of a pokerbacked nutcracker wife.