Under Milkwood

Under Milk Wood is a 1954 radio drama by Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, commissioned by the BBC and later adapted for the stage. A film version, Under Milk Wood directed by Andrew Sinclair, was released in 1972.

An omniscient narrator invites the audience to listen to the dreams and innermost thoughts of the inhabitants of the fictional small Welsh fishing village Llareggub ("" backwards).

They include Mrs. Ogmore-Pritchard, relentlessly nagging her two dead husbands; Captain Cat, reliving his seafaring times; the two Mrs. Dai Breads; Organ Morgan, obsessed with his music; and Polly Garter, pining for her dead lover. Later, the town awakens and, aware now of how their feelings affect whatever they do, we watch them go about their daily business.

When Thomas was staying at New Quay, Cardiganshire, in West Wales, one winter, he went out early one morning into the still sleeping town and verses came to his mind about the inhabitants. He wrote the account of this as a short story named "Quite Early One Morning" (recorded for BBC Wales on 14 December 1944 and broadcast 31 August 1945). He continued to work on the idea for the remaining eight years of his life.

In 1931 a 17-year-old Dylan created a piece for the Swansea Grammar School magazine which included a conversation of Milk Wood stylings with Mussolini, Wife, Mr. Pritchard & Mr. Ogmore. In it are lines which are nearly identical to those that would later be found in Milk Wood. A year later in 1932, Dylan talked at length with his mentor and friend Bert Trick, 'The socialist grocer of Brynmill', about creating a play about a Welsh seaside town. At Bert Trick's bungalow in Caswell, Gower in 1933 Dylan read an embryonic 'Under Milk Wood'.

In an interview with Colin Edwards, Bert Trick recalls: "He read it to Nell and me in our bungalow at Caswell around the old Dover stove, with the paraffin lamps lit at night ... the story was then called Llareggub, which was a mythical village in South Wales, a typical village, with terraced houses with one ty bach to about five cottages and the various characters coming out and emptying the slops and exchanging greetings and so on; that was the germ of the idea which ... developed into Under Milkwood. (Dylan Remembered Volume 1, page 165)

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