“Jack Kerouac, all the beat poets, were obsessed by him. When he spoke at 92NY, he was about to finish without reciting a poem of his called Fern Hill, and the audience started to chant ‘Fern Hill! Fern Hill!’ It’s kind of staggering to think that a poet of his time would sell out this enormous… Continue reading
Posts tagged Dylan Thomas
Under Milk Wood – 70 years on
The BBC first broadcast Under Milk Wood, “‘A Play for Voices”, on the Third Programme on 25 January 1954 (two months after Thomas’s death). The play featured a distinguished, all-Welsh cast including Richard Burton. Dylan Thomas knew Under Milk Wood was good, even in its hurried, jumbled, unfinished form in which he gave several performances in 1953, with a cast,… Continue reading →
In the house where Dylan Thomas set “A Child’s Christmas in Wales”
Dickens started our passion for Christmas books, but who has time for the whole of Pickwick Papers, unless you just read the snowy, seasonal scenes? A Christmas Carol is a possibility, but, weighed down with Victorian sentimentality, it lends itself to cinematic or theatrical adaptation rather then a comfy read in an armchair. I turn to the accessible… Continue reading →
Sobers’ six sixes ground – where tide tables dictated the bowling
“The incoming tide was said to favour the bowlers [at St Helens]. Glamorgan captains of the past such as Wilf Wooller and Maurice Turnbull would consult the tide tables for Swansea Bay before going out to take the toss.” How Garfield Sobers beat cricket’s ultimate record. Extract 5. This is the fifth in a series… Continue reading →
A Child’s Christmas – in New York and Swansea
This Christmas season, 2015, Dylan Thomas’s “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” is being performed in two very appropriate places (as well as in many other venues in the English speaking world) – in Swansea, where Dylan was born in 1914, and New York, where he died in 1953. The Swansea production, at the Dylan Thomas… Continue reading →
A Child’s Christmas in Wales comes to Dylan’s home.
Dylan Thomas’s A Child’s Christmas in Wales is set in epic snow “as white as Lapland”. This year, 2010, snow fit for Dylan’s famous story fell on Swansea.
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