DO NOT GO GENTLE
Back in the 70s, I spent several days in Laugharne in Wales, the setting for Under Milkwood by Dylan Thomas. In those days, the poet’s boathouse and writing shed were not open to visitors and peeking through the windows gave one the only available access. Folks in town did remember habitués of the pub buying Thomas a pint when he couldn’t afford one and they told of his wife Caitlin who, drunk at his burial, was held aloft by mourners on either side. Then, as now, Thomas exuded a mystique to which many were susceptible, especially on hearing his booming and plaintive voice in delivery of poems that sounded like grand echoes made of eloquent language.
It’s not a boom of public pronouncement one hears in Geraint Wyn Davies’ voice in a one man show titled Do Not Go Gentle, but foggier tones of inner dialogue and intimate conversation. We sense that this is Dylan thinking through each word and cadence, engaging and not overwhelming his listener, living the creation of his words and thoughts. This is not so much proof that “a writer plans his casual appearance” but a candid view of a writer and human being in reflection, before, in public, he will then make every observation a public pronouncement. In this intimate space, he confides, “I was very good at being a child” and indeed he here seems as much a child as a grown man. He also reveals his private but enthusiastic relationship with his creations, and we feel that words are his heartbeat.
In part, Geraint Wyn Davies gives us the poet’s innocence, tells us what he notices in his life and what gives him pause. He reveals an element I’ve long sensed in Thomas, not a bombastic poet over a pint, but a small town fellow, a boy out of his depth in the world, gossiping over a cup of tea. As Thomas, Davies confides throughout, as with, “The ladies think I’m thinking all the time” and lets loose with “God damn you academics, you’re just as dead as I am but at least I have my art.” We hear the voice of admiration and inadequacy when of Shakespeare he states, “That son of a bitch, he wrote it all.”
The reading of poems has greater value, then, because we feel we’ve come to them through the poet’s inner life that he has shared with us. “Do Not Go Gentle” is read with a realization of each word’s import, with almost an approving caress of each phrase, with a rush of cadence one feels, while writing, in discovery. Davies reads the poems as if he is listening to himself, hearing himself, discovering himself.
This is an immensely engaging show, pleasantly raunchy and blunt with sexual exploits savoured and an Act I closer of “I don’t know about you, but I could use a piss.” It is also loosely structured, but when is the human heart, like the one it depicts, ever tidy? And when his ever-emptying bottle finally gives Dylan the shakes or when he asks a fundamental question of human existence –“Is anybody ever really listening?”- we feel we are present beside tragedy. It’s tragedy that creeps in under the simplified myth that simple minds want of poets, myth that makes life, now less complex, easier to handle.