THEATRE REVIEW: DO NOT GO GENTLE
15 Jul'10

Dylan Thomas play intoxicating

JOHN COULBOURN - QMI Agency
Rating: 4 out of 5

STRATFORD - If you seek beyond the poetry to know the soul of a poet, chances are you will find only brief glimpses of it, tucked away in the further recesses of the soul of a very mortal man or woman. For while their verses may seem to flow from the land of the gods, poets themselves too often not only dwell in a world of flesh and blood, dirt and decay, but revel in it with inordinate glee.

Certainly, Welsh poet Dylan Thomas did -- a fact well documented in a host of biographies and in DO NOT GO GENTLE, a work created a quarter century ago by Leon Pownall, a beloved figure on the stages of the Stratford Festival. But though DO NOT GO GENTLE made only brief appearances on the Stratford stage during Pownall's lifetime, debuting under the title of 'Dylan Thomas Bach', it has returned once again to its stages, where it opened in the Studio Theatre Tuesday, for a summer run.

As when last it played a too-brief part of the Studio's inaugural season, DO NOT GO GENTLE features Geraint Wyn Davies in the role of the poet Thomas, recreating a dark and fearless performance shaped under Pownall's direction with the assistance of Dean Gabourie. And it's a mammoth task, reconciling the man who created enduring works like A CHILD'S CHRISTMAS IN WALES, UNDER MILK WOOD and, of course, the work that gives this play its title, with a life of often riotous excess -- a life that ended before Thomas' 40th birthday, cut short by drunken excess.

We meet Thomas, not at the zenith of his career nor at the nadir of his life, but rather in a very Catholic no-man's-land in the present day to which he has been at least theatrically consigned since his death, searching for reconciliation. In the midst of a littered office, in which a drinks tray and a full bottle of whiskey figure prominently, Wyn Davies' Thomas sets about imposing order, a task from which he is easily and quickly diverted by the full bottle on his desk.

In the next hour or so, the bottle will be emptied, and Wyn Davies' progressively drunker Thomas will share not only a snapshot of his life but a glimpse of his hell as well, with a sometimes spellbound, sometimes revolted audience. Serially, and occasionally even simultaneously poetic and profane, his impish Thomas creates dizzying towers of words and phrases and sets them down in lush landscapes of imagination, only to kick them to pieces in piques of childish glee. He evokes a childhood wrenched from his grasp by the onset of puberty and still missed, even while he revels in the excesses that were part and parcel of the transformation. He remembers with fondness the Welsh roots from which he sprung -- a mystical grandfather touched by the history of his people, a father who shared with his sickly son a deep love of Shakespeare, only to give him a flail with which to whip himself in later life. But he remembers too the women and the sex, the casual encounters and the deep loves, including his wife Caitlin, with whom he shared a stormy, drunken life. And finally, in death, he remembers the poetry -- precious jewels mined from the cesspit of his lifetime.

Ironically and despite its title, it is not Thomas' words that are likely to fill one's mind in the end, but those of another poet and writer undone by excess. For when Oscar Wilde observed that we are all of us in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars, it is more than possible that not even he suspected the depth of this gutter. Or the brightness of these stars.