Under Milk Wood: Live on Air at The Courtyard (From Hereford Times)

Under Milk Wood: Live on Air at The Courtyard

11:38am Tuesday 15th February 2011 in Leisure

TAKING a cherished classic and giving it a unique spin is a big challenge, but it’s a challenge that Splice Productions have risen to triumphantly with a gloriously funny and touching re-invention of Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood, directed by Kath Rogers.

True to their name, the company have spliced together theatre and radio, to make a visual drama out of Thomas’s ‘play for voices’ that at times was sublimely funny. But the real genius of this production is that not a word has been changed and not a word added to the original, yet what’s been created feels entirely new. Opening with a cheesy Sixties soundtrack (when did you last hear Little White Bull?) and the drone of a hoover being run round the studio, the audience files in and is instantly transformed into the audience for a 10th anniversary radio broadcast of Under Milk Wood, with a cast of two and a studio assistant responsible for all the special effects.

But it’s soon clear that all is not well with Betty, the Foley artist, who we see reading a letter before turning to a large bottle of gin for consolation ... repeatedly and with increasingly disruptive effect. As Mr Glynn Williams (Bob Gwilym) and Miss Joyce Jones (Kerry Joy Stewart) give voice to the teeming cast of characters resident in Llareggub, an edge creeps in as they become ever-more distracted by Betty’s antics.

There is humour in Thomas’s closely observed characters - Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard continuing to henpeck her two husbands beyond the grave, Polly Garter pining for her lost love, Myfanwy Price dreaming endlessly of Mog Edwards, and Mrs Cherry Owen who loves both her husbands, the drunk and the sober - but counterpointing the lyricism of Under Milk Wood with the broad brush of slapstick is a masterstroke, and the interplay between the three principals as their broadcast teeters on the edge of disaster creates three new and equally memorable characters, each of them fully and engagingly realised.

From concept to execution, Under Milk Wood: Live on Air delivers, but invidious though it is to single out one actor in such a great production, Natasha Pring was hysterical as the hapless, drink-sodden Betty.

Under Milk Wood: Live on Air is at The Courtyard Studio tonight, February 15 and tomorrow night, Wednesday, February 16 at 7.45pm.

To book, call the box office on 01432 340555.