DYLAN THOMAS - RETURN JOURNEY.

Tour.

DYLAN THOMAS – RETURN JOURNEY
by Bob Kingdom from the works of Dylan Thomas.

Tour.
Runs 1hr 45min One interval.
Review: Timothy Ramsden 24 October.

Short of reincarnation, this is as close to Thomas as we’ll get.
Life can take you by surprise. I set off for Colchester to see Coriolanus at the Mercury. But a damaged limb had done for Coriolanus by the time I got there, so it was round the corner to the former church now housing Colchester Arts Centre to catch Bob Kingdom’s much-travelled one-man Dylan Thomas show.

From expectations of maximum Shakespeare to the minimalism of one man and a lectern is a big step. But there’s nothing minimal about Kingdom’s representation of Dylan on a lecture tour near the end of his life: alone he does it. Nor about Thomas’s language, in verse or prose.

His writing, a kind of Welsh baroque treatment of English, contrasts the terseness of, say, Beckett or Pinter (but hardly the profusion of Beckett’s one-time employer James Joyce). It was fashionable in the 1940s, and Thomas had two advantages: being Welsh in a literary world controlled largely by the English. Once they decided someone from Swansea should be taken up, he would be afforded a particular place with stylistic room of his own.

And Thomas had the wit which brought friends and supporters in that establishment. Kingdom’s deliberate, unhurried expression, his use of telling pauses, make it easy to imagine Thomas holding court with acidic accounts of his experiences. At first this seems the assimilated Thomas, the Welsh quality aurally glimpsed though education into English society. Later, the Welsh manner is very evident, taking us back to earlier times and places.

The first half is immaculate, a splendid evocation of the man and his public manner. The detail of a small Welsh community and its individuals are vivid, while a formality of manner keeps Thomas’s presence ever-apparent. After the interval, somehow, the presentation seems less varied, more reliant on Welsh charm.

But there’s still the vivid writing, prose as much as poetry made to be spoken. The famous verses - Fern Hill, Do Not Go Gentle and so on - which can seem self-conscious read off the page, acquire in Kingdom’s well-judged performance the liquid quality of rivers running a rich, strange and often melancholy course.

Dylan Thomas: Bob Kingdom.

Director: Anthony Hopkins.

2007-10-26 14:23:33