"Under Milk Wood". Keble O'Reilly

Well, this was lovely.

Ted Fussell’s adaptation of Dylan Thomas’s raucous-cum-elegiac radio play about the inhabitants of a small Welsh fishing village called Llareggub (‘Buggerall’ backwards) quite brilliantly bucks the trend of student productions that dispense with stagecraft and trust entirely to performance. Instead, Fussell’s Under Milk Wood draws on a myriad of theatrical techniques as distinctive and multifarious as the village characters themselves.

Let’s get the one gripe out of the way: the voices (with one or two exceptions) are just too quiet. When there is an almost constant musical underscore, a traverse staging – meaning the actors have to face away from half the audience much of the time – and it all takes place in a big hangar of a venue like the O’Reilly, then amplification is needed. While Thomas’s witty and evocative language comes through much of the time, quite a lot of detail is lost. This is a shame. But it’s more than made up for by the sensitively created joys of Fussell’s beautiful production.

Where to begin? Well, how about the sky? Under Milk Wood starts at nighttime, and billowing white sheets hang low over the stage and audience, almost brushing our heads while soft pink lights of dusk glow through the fabric. It feels like a cloudy Welsh night hemming the villagers into their homes, and us along with them. When dawn breaks about forty minutes into the show, the sheets rise into the sky, and it has the genuine sensation of a new day.

This sort of gently effective stagecraft permeates the show. There are purpose-built puppets of foxes, children and a lost lover, whose mute presence is all the more poignant for its simple construction. There are shadow projections depicting the village and some of the events that take place there. At one breathtaking moment a character’s tiny silhouetted hand reaches out to the giant hand of another on the screen, stretching both light and reality. Tables and fishing boats are fashioned out of sheets held by the actors, as if the whole life of this little community is homespun and fragile. In one gloriously poetic scene, the elderly blind sailor Captain Cat (Wally McCabe) identifies the women of the town from the sound of their footsteps, which are created by the on-stage sound crew tapping tiny items against their desk.

And then there’s the music. Rather than an orchestra, here we have a fiddle, a guitar, a harp and a tin whistle. The sound is wonderful, pure Welsh folk, and (in another insouciantly touching moment) at the climax of the play, the little band of musicians comes out of the wings and performs live on stage, to the delight of the audience.

On top of all this, there’s a framing device for the entire play. It starts (and ends) with an old-fashioned BBC Radio ‘On Air’ light and one announcer (Bea Smalley) reciting the opening monologue, after which the village comes to life and the sound studio fades away. This of course nods to Under Milk Wood’s origins as a radio play, but it also pays homage to Dylan Thomas himself, who played that announcer’s voice in the very first radio production back in 1953.

It's an all-consuming, immersive, sensory experience. And it swings from the tragic (Polly Garter, who has affairs with the men of the village but can think only of her dead love) to the comic (Mr Pugh the schoolmaster, who dreams of poisoning his wife in ever more dastardly ways, but never gets round to it), with style and pace.

But at the heart of Under Milk Wood, there is, and always will be, Thomas’s rich, flowing, dirty, beautiful language. ‘Starless and bible-black, the cobble streets silent and the hunched, courters’-and-rabbits’ wood limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboatbobbing sea’. ‘I will lie by your side like a Sunday roast before the mice gnaw at your bottom drawer’. ‘Lovesick wood-pigeons mooning in bed’. ‘The town smells of seaweed and breakfast’. God knows how, but Thomas even makes the phrase ‘tinned salmon’ echo with power and meaning.

And I haven’t even mentioned the programme. It’s an impressive, full-colour, tri-fold creation, featuring a hand-drawn map of the village, with the actors’ names and their characters’ homes marked on the houses. Stunning, and reassuringly professional.

As the play comes to an end, the villagers return to their troubled beds and mumble in their sleep. As the Reverend Jenkins says, ‘They are not wholly bad or good.’ They sleep to rise again in future productions. Organ Morgan, Sinbad Sailors and Gossamer Beynon will return as long as Dylan Thomas is the heart of Welsh poetry. But for now, as the music stops, and Ted Fussell modestly stands to accept the applause of his admiring cast, they fade, fade into the dying of the light.