CAITLIN. To 10 November.

Tour

CAITLIN
by Mike Kenny

Sherman Theatre Tour to 10 November 2003
Runs 1hr 5min No interval
Review: Timothy Ramsden 25 August at Metro Gilded Balloon Teviot, Edinburgh

For once, too little of a good thing.She spent 20 years with Dylan Thomas, twice that time as his widow. Still, as she departs forever from our sight, Caitlin Macnamara comments, we'd none of us have heard of her for herself. It was the aptly-initialled Welsh poet whose light was shed all over her.

She'd already been an artist's model - getting sexually-assaulted in the process (people then being taught the human body was a temple, but men somehow learning that the attractive female body was available for their worship).She took it, so to speak, on the chin. Then there were her dancing years.

But loving the lying Dylan was her claim to our memories. It's a fascinating story, finely crafted in Mike Kenny's luminous script, well-delivered by the Sherman's unjustly anonymous actor.

True, there's a public one-dimensionality as Caitlin sinks into alcohol dependency; a defensive-aggressive tone. But the pleading never becomes whining. The toughness contrasts the lyricism that a less faithless famous lover might have developed.

It's not just the other women. It's a question of how the less celebrated partner of a much-lauded artist survives when not a creative genius in a recognised artistic or literary form, or a financially-independent person. For society requires apparent genius or wealth in its darlings. The world forgives its artists, but not its mothers.

An undiagnosed diabetic, Dylan Thomas possibly died of the treatment American doctors gave him. He comes over as a heel, if a loved one. It only takes a few seconds of his recorded voice richly reciting his fertile lines to realise how he attracted Caitlin's love - and admiration from the literary establishment of his briefish day.

As a reflection on this phenomenon, and an account of a life ultimately wasted by its link to glory, the play succeeds. It would be nice to learn a little more of Caitlin's world before and after Dylan - how his friends treated her over the years. How she survived. What there was at her core before they met, which brought Dylan so close to her. For once, thanks to the well-delivered, tight-packed script, there feels room for more. We want to read on.

Caitlin: Helen Griffin

Director: Phil Clark
Designer: Sean Crowley
Lighting: Chris Illingworth
Musical director: Paula Gardiner

2003-08-30 14:50:51