Dylan Thomas Return Journey

Performed by Bob Kingston 80 min solo drama
Playhouse 7th – 8th March

Reviewed by Darren Guy

I sometimes feel I have grown up in a cultural vacuum, when you read about great English speaking poets, W.H Auden, Louis McNeice, T.S Eliot & Dylan Thomas, you almost feel like you were born too late. They are all gone, and all you have is their work. I’m sure people would argue that 21st Century poetry is just as good if not better, with its precision in imagery, but I find much of it unemotional, and find difficulty connecting with it.

Maybe I’m just not read enough, but apart from Liverpool’s own Brian Paton, and maybe one or two others, very little else strikes a chord. Instead I search the bookshops, libraries and internet for translated poetry, Chile’ s Neruda, Spains Lorca and more recently the uncrowned Turkish king Nazim Hikmit, not to mention Greece’s Ritsos and modern day Balkan poetry, in particular Alex DebeljK. Maybe with the older English speaking poets it’s the harping back to things gone that makes them so attractive – but my favourite poets were the ones for me that created the strongest imagery and they were T.S Eliot and Dylan Thomas so when I stumbled upon ‘ Return Journey’– it was a great opportunity to visit a place I had never been, and pretend to be in the company of Dylan Thomas.

Dylan Thomas' poetry and his stories are always best listened to, rather than read. And the reading was perfect. Bob Kingdom looked like him, sounded like him and entertained like him. Bob is a Welshman himself from Cardiff instead of Swansea, maybe the welsh people in audience could tell the difference but I couldn’t.
He intermingled a perfect array of Thomas’s childhood stories, with his poetry, and I was completely thrilled when the first poem that came up was my favourite of all of Thomas ‘Poem in October’.

‘It turned away from the blithe country
and down the other air and the blue altered sky
Streamed again a wonder of summer
With apples
Pears and red currants
And I saw in the turning so clearly a child’s
Forgotten mornings when he walked with his mother
Through the parables of sun light
And the legends of the green chapels.'

In between the stories and the description of Thomas's colourful characters, which brought howls of laughter from the audience, he read ’Lament’, 'The Force that through the Green Fuse’, 'Death Shall have no Dominion’, 'Do not go gentle into that good night' and finished with ‘Fern Hill’. Tom stayed around for discussion afterwards. I, like the rest of the audience enjoyed being in the company of the pretend Dylan Thomas.

The only sadness was there were not more people there, or maybe it was just that the playhouse was so big a venue. The intimacy of the Unity might have been more in character with the piece. Or maybe its a sign of the times, as Bob said, when people are more interested in materialism, rather than soulful gratification, But I look forward to the day when we will have similar shows, with the return of T.S Eliot, Pablo Neruda or maybe even Sylvia Plath.