Under Milk Wood

Dylan Thomas's radio play follows one full day, dawn to dawn again, in the invented Welsh fishing village of Llareggub, opening with an unnamed narrator, First Voice, inviting listeners into the dreams of the sleeping town. Captain Cat, a blind retired sea captain, dreams of drowned shipmates and his lost love Rosie Probert; the twice widowed Mrs. Ogmore Pritchard nags the ghosts of both her dead husbands even in sleep; the shy draper Mog Edwards and dressmaker Myfanwy Price, in love for years, communicate only by letter and never actually meet. Morning arrives with the Reverend Eli Jenkins delivering a sunrise sermon to his empty church, and the play moves through an ordinary day of gossip at Organ Morgan's shop and children playing before night falls again and the town's sleepers return to the same dreams they woke from. Thomas gives the piece no real plot in the ordinary sense, no crisis to resolve, only the accumulated portrait of an entire community's private and public selves laid open at once.

Thomas writes in dense, musical prose closer to verse than to ordinary radio dialogue, packing puns, rhythm and unbroken sound play into voices meant to be heard rather than read, and the piece rewards listening more than reading silently; large stretches work as pure sound before they work as sense, which is part of why it has stayed a favorite for actors and readers aloud ever since.

Thomas wrote much of it under desperate pressure during his final tour of America, still finishing the second half on the train between Boston and New York days before its first public reading, and drew the town's name, and its comic reversal, backward: Llareggub read right to left spells out bugger all. He died on November 9, 1953, in New York, before the BBC could record him reading the finished play himself.