workin

So all 89 pages of Under Milk Wood are sloshing about in my head. In order to make room for them I have pushed out all the American state capitals, your name and my immune system. Now the great challenge of making everyone of those glorious characters lovely, in a three dimensional, ‘gosh, that mean lady is so different to the other mean lady’ way begins. I’m equally excited, terrified and manic.

The Perpetual Rehearsal

Vanessa and Nat and I have now been working on UMW in earnest for about four months. We’ve blocked out scenes, we’ve made audio and visual accompaniment. We’ve modified the audio so that it flits from speaker to speaker in motion with girls chasing boys, Vanessa has painted over images of maps and cows and made them move, we have given voice and life to over 30 of the 60 odd characters, Nat has designed a set and is making a bath. I have performed a snippet for a bunch of social workers attending a highly tenuously linked seminar.

Bet we have no venue.

This isn’t a bad thing. It’s not practical that’s for sure. But it’s not bad. It’s kind of fascinating…

Working on a show with no venue, no deadlines, no impending reward is like having a deeply passionate long term affair with a hermit. Or maybe like being a pregnant elephant.

We are working on UMW because we love it and we love playing. Sooner or later someone will pour a bucket of water on our heads and our lustful glazed eyes will crystalise into clarity and pragmatism and we will get down to the other side of the business.

But for now, you can find Nat sketching on the floor and Vanessa digitalising images, both keeping a half eye on me rolling around on the bed talking to myself on any given weekend.

My Grandfather had a Medal

I am digging about. I don’t want to disappoint Ness and Tim who are excited by the prospect of authentic, tangible, personal Welsh things. My dad has a red suitcase under his bed. It sits next to the axe handle which is his weapon of choice for intruders – only slightly less threatening since he ‘shabby chicked’ it along with the walls. Now it is ‘rustic’ white, with uneven, mottled country style appeal. The red suitcase contains everything my dad took home from Wales when his mother died. I don’t think he has looked at it much, I think it gives him the heebie jeebies. There is certainly nothing of value in there, but there may be some interesting trinkets we can play with. I am fascinated by dad’s report cards from the early 1950s. Not sure if we can use them, maybe they can be No Good Boyo’s… At any rate, I intend to make this show as difficult for my dad to watch as possible.

From our preliminary research, Ness and I have been struck by one thing in particular. It seems as though Dylan’s lyricism and fancy much closer to the Ibsen ‘mirror to the audience’ than I thought. I have always been aware of the sense of allegory to every small Welsh town, the allusions to the Welsh Methodist sermon and preacher, the lilt of the language reflected in the metre and various other tropes, gleaned from a literary and cultural analysis. But it wasn’t until Ness began to read books and I began to reflect on some of the stories from my own family that I began to consider Under Milk Wood as an anthropological report.

My grandfather who worked in a foundry, rode a motorcycle and had epileptic fits on the highway, who was gentle as cotton and loving as a mug of leek soup had a medal. In WW2 he kissed my grandmother goodbye and boarded a cargo ship, bearing potatoes across trade-lines. When the ship was attacked, many cold Welsh sailors ducked and weaved and struggled and were killed. By potatoes. When shells hit the ship they burst open the hundreds of wooden crates, and potatoes flew like bullets in every direction. My grandfather was thrown overboard. Flailing about he managed to find one side of a wooden crate, which he used as a raft. Alone, on this rotting piece of wood he floated away to a magical place called Jamaica.

Now what happens next did not pass the ethics committee. Grampy Joe arrived in Jamaica and stayed there. For months. No letters home. He just…. partied. In all likelihood there are a smattering of Lodges terrorising the Caribbean somewhere. When he went back, he found his own house, his wife’s house blown up. At this point my Grampy Joe and Nanna Margery think each other are dead. Eventually they find one another and live in anxiety and poverty for the rest of their natural lives. But for his services, he was given a medal. As far as I know it’s the greatest contribution a Lodge has ever made to a war effort. Not dying.