Cyclic Delirium.
A Theatrical Paraphrase of Under milk wood
By Benjamin Gavarre
® Benjamín Gavarre Silva
Contacto: gavarreunam@gmail.com
benjamingavarre@filos.unam.mx
In 1954, the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas penned a play for voices titled Under Milk Wood. Its premise: to burrow into the minds, the hungers, and the dreams of the inhabitants of a mythical fishing village named Llaregyb. If you read the village’s name backwards, it spells "Bugger all"—a cheeky Welsh-English phrase meaning "I don’t give a damn." That tells you everything you need to know about his brand of humor.
The original piece boasts over sixty characters—a drowning sea of voices featuring drunkards, repressed dressmakers, dead sailors pining for rum, mystic gypsies, and cleanliness-obsessed widows who sleep, dream, and awaken over the course of a single spring day.
Since crowding sixty actors onto a stage is a theatrical nightmare, we chose to craft a dramatic paraphrase. We condensed those sixty voices into just three actors who swap masks, hats, and postures at a breakneck, dizzying pace. All of this is set in a surrealist landscape inspired by the paintings of Giorgio de Chirico, where time stands frozen and the clocks go mad.
Surrealism, the Theatre of the Absurd, and this baroque farce are not meant to be "understood" by the brain; they are felt through the ear, the gut, and the rhythm.
The wood is open.
CHARACTERS
- CAPI (Captain Cat): Blind, deaf when convenient, possessing the reflexes of a retired ninja. He navigates dry land aboard a wheeled stool. A ship’s bell is lashed to his waist. Often, his mouth is colonized by the drowned dead of the sea and the petty baseness of war.
- MOG: A draper afflicted by the spontaneous combustion of love. When the rhythm accelerates, he becomes the vessel for starved poets and beggars of affection.
- MISS FANNY: A lethal dressmaker and professional suspect. She dreams of lace and currant-flavored arsenic. Her body is inhabited by the ghosts of tragic actresses who never escaped the village.
STAGE SETTING
A pitch-black stage. Center stage, a colossal wall clock whose hands spin backward with an intermittent, mechanical clatter. Invisible threads crisscross the space in sharp geometric tensions (De Chirico style), hung with prop herrings, giant love letters, tarnished military medals, peacock feathers, and bowler hats.
Cyclic Delirium (Part 1)
(Absolute silence. A sharp, piercing white spotlight illuminates CAPTAIN CAT (CAPI), crouching upon his wheeled stool in the center of the stage, rowing furiously through the air with a walking stick).
CAPI
(With a voice of muffled thunder, deep, almost musical)
To begin at the beginning of the end: it is a time-stopping night in the village, bible-black and crow-dark. The houses shut their eyes like paranoid moles. The sea, that salty old scavenger, chews on the fishing dories.
(From the dense, shadowy darkness emerge MOG and MISS FANNY. They tiptoe forward, performing rigid, symmetrical, choreographed movements, like marionettes with strings pulled far too tight).
MOG
(To the audience, stretching his neck, whispering at breakneck speed but with crystalline diction)
The town sleeps. Sleeps the cobbler with a nail on his tongue; sleeps the postman with letters glued to his ribs; sleeps the undertaker measuring his own pillow. All, all are asleep!
FANNY
(Drawing a giant magnifying glass from her apron, examining the air with jerky, spasmodic jerks)
Save for us. And the air, which tonight reeks of suspicion and corridor-conspiracy. Listen! The stars fall like pins upon the chapel roof.
(MOG executes a stylized, acrobatic leap, landing cleanly on his knees before FANNY, unrolling a strip of red flannel with a sharp flick of his wrist as if it were a royal carpet).
MOG
My Fanny Price Puh of my devotion! I love you more than all the velvet, the silk, and the tulle in the drapers' shops of hell. Let me be your Sunday delicacy, the electric toaster of your polar sheets. Say yes before the mice devour my ledgers!
FANNY
(Snapping open a black fan with military precision, concealing half her face)
Mog! Your love gives me hives and various verses. I shall knit you a forget-me-not blue purse to keep your cold coins in, but first... (Suddenly shifting her posture to the stiff, inquisitorial stance of an old governess) Wipe your boots! You have trodden on the graveyard dew, and it is crawling with eighteenth-century bacteria.
CAPI
(Fiercely clanging the bell at his waist as he wheels in concentric circles around the couple).
Gale to port! Ghosts in the galley! I feel the tread of the drowned soldiers fallen in the mud-trenches of Gallipoli. They come marching over the cobbles with seaweed in their ears and tin medals on their deflated chests. Captain Evans, Lieutenant Jones... reporting duty, missing limbs but with uniforms neatly pressed.
(Suddenly, the lighting shifts abruptly to a ghostly, spectral MILITARY GREEN. MOG and FANNY instantly freeze in a grotesque posture of their argument: Mog with arms outstretched pleading, and Fanny with her fan half-open. CAPI stops, stands tall upon his stool, and looks directly at the audience with a sly, wicked grin).
CAPI
(To the audience, with a raspy, mundane, bullet-fast voice — ASIDE)
In the village parades, they sing hymns to me and call me "the nation’s blind hero." Fairy tales to comfort the old folks! If I went deaf in the war, it was from staying as far as humanly possible from the screams of the front lines—hidden away in the supply cellar, stealing chocolate rations and the officers' cognac. And I didn't lose my eyes to enemy fire either; bad moonshine burned them right out in a Marseille brothel. But let them keep weeping over my medals... as long as they keep paying my pension, I’ll keep marching backward for them.
(A sharp thud from the great clock in the background shatters the green light, returning to the original lighting. MOG and FANNY snap out of their freeze with a subtle twitch, continuing the scene as if nothing had happened).
CAPI
(Recovering his poetic, martial, and grandiloquent voice aimed at the void)
...You wretched specters, do not gnaw on my bone of desires, for today the rum tastes of gunpowder and holy water!
Cyclic Delirium (Part 2)
(Immediately following CAPI’s martial cry, MOG suffers a violent spinal spasm. He rips off his draper’s hat with fury, flings it to the floor, runs both hands wildly through his hair, and drops into a languid, sickly, decaying posture, bending his knees before FANNY like a damned poet).
MOG
(With a broken, threadbare voice, dragging his syllables with tragic affectation)
Let them march, Capi! The poets of the village are unburied tonight as well. Alphabet-beggars, rhyme-mongers who traded their manuscripts for a rotten herring...
(A thunderous "CLACK!" echoes from the clock in the background. The lighting shifts instantly to a thick, nocturnal blue, pooling only over him. CAPI and FANNY freeze in exaggerated poses: CAPI with his walking stick raised high as if to strike an invisible foe, and FANNY slapping a hand over her mouth in a stiff, cartoonish gesture of horror. MOG takes two quick steps toward the apron, winking at the audience).
MOG
(To the audience, with a cynical, swift, conspiratorial voice — ASIDE)
I write verses of mystic love to the apothecary’s daughter, telling her in my rhymes that her soul is a snow-white swan floating in the mire... A grand, baroque lie! All I really want is for her father to advance me some opium for this wretched toothache, and for her to let me touch her calves behind the vestry next Sunday. We poets are just beggars with good spelling; we barter sonnets for a plate of lentils and a grope in the dark. Let them swallow my metaphors while I pick their pockets clean!
(Another sharp thud from the clock returns the lighting to the original Hopper yellow. CAPI and FANNY snap back to life with a subtle mechanical twitch. MOG leaps backward, re-assuming his languid pose and rolling his eyes toward the heavens).
MOG
(Aloud, with a poetic, affected, and vibrating tone)
...We write verses on the alley walls with graveyard chalk! We hunger! Hunger for living metaphors, hunger for a lip that does not reek of damp earth... Oh, the unattainable beauty of misery!
(FANNY, hearing this, lets out a histrionic, mocking laugh. She spins on one foot, plucks a peacock feather hanging from an invisible thread in the ceiling, drives it into her hair, and adopts the grandiloquent pose of a fallen opera diva, stretching her arms toward the clock).
FANNY
(With a hollow, tragic voice, rolling her R’s dramatically)
Silence, tavern poets and low-born scribblers! Make way for the great Myfanwy Hughes! The actress who should have conquered the stages of London, but was left stranded in this damned fishing village, rehearsing Shakespeare to the hens...
(The clock emits a sharp electrical hum. The lighting shifts abruptly to a deep, blood-RED spotlight over FANNY. MOG freezes on his knees, hand on his heart like a cardboard suitor; CAPI remains petrified atop his stool, rowing motionless through the air. FANNY fans herself slowly, looking down at the audience with aristocratic scorn).
FANNY
(To the audience, with a dry, cold, calculating, and ambitious voice — ASIDE)
I weep for Shakespeare and curse this village that reeks of stale herring... but the truth is, in London, I’d starve and nobody would know my name. I much prefer being the undisputed queen of this coop of illiterates, charging triple for wedding gowns to the mayor’s idiotic daughters, and sleeping with the butcher in exchange for the prime cuts of meat without paying a pence. The gossips say my soul is broken by art... Ha! What’s broken is my corset from being too tight, and I have a breeding hatred for anyone wearing a better hat than mine. Let them applaud my tragedy... while I collect their mourning fees.
(The clock's hum ceases and the Hopper light snaps back. MOG and CAPI return to life. FANNY bursts into an exaggerated theatrical weep, throwing the back of her hand to her forehead).
FANNY
(Aloud, heartbreaking and dramatic)
...The audience is dead, but the applause of the wind is eternal! Bring forth the lights of my funeral! Bring forth the poison for this misunderstood artist!
Cyclic Delirium (Part 3 and Final)
(Immediately following FANNY’s tragic cry, MOG and FANNY launch into a rhythmic, frantic, almost mechanical physical game. They pass a prop bowler hat back and forth at a dizzying, breakneck speed. With every exchange of the hat, they instantly morph into a different character with a sudden body twitch or a sharp voice shift: a soldier saluting, a beggar holding out his hand, a weeping actress, a calculating merchant. CAPI wheels between them on his stool, dodging them like a ghost).
MOG
(Juggling the bowler hat, with the draper's sharp voice)
Time flies! The day explodes! The sun is a golden cockerel pecking at the eyes of the sleepers...
(Swaps the bowler to his other hand, slonching his back like a vagrant)
...and waking the beggars who sleep beneath the rot-splintered pier, counting invisible coins among their plague-ridden rags!
(The great clock in the background begins to chime with an unprecedented acoustic violence, sounding like a machine-gun of ticks and tocks. The lighting shifts abruptly to a glaring, flat, Hopper-esque yellow, drenching the entire stage).
FANNY
(Keeping strict time with the relentless clock, drawing an invisible teacup from her apron and offering it to MOG with a rehearsed, doll-like smile)
Here is your morning tea, my love. I have laced it with three spoonfuls of white sugar and two drops of that nameless poison used by tragic actresses in the third act. Drink up, for it is time to shake the canary and disinfect your thoughts from the night.
MOG
(Launches into a frantic Welsh clog-dance, drumming his boots furiously against the floor while dodging the invisible cup)
No time to die, the shop is open today! The DIVA is singing at the wash-tub with her broken soprano voice, dunking her babies into milk-pails; the ghost-soldiers are polishing their rusted rifles with the morning dew, and Postman WINWIN is steaming open other men's mail with the vapor of his own breath. Life is terrible, thank God!
CAPI
(Stops dead in his tracks at the exact center of the stage, slamming his walking stick down with immense force. A sudden, sepulchral silence cuts the clock's frantic ticking).
Hush at the water-pump! Someone approaches. It is the echo of the town looking into the shaving mirror and finding itself upside down. The living mimic the dead; the dead act as though they were alive.
FANNY
(Takes a sharp step forward, staring wide-eyed into the audience, shedding all previous affectation and speaking with a raw, stark honesty)
Who lives beneath this milk wood? We are the very same as yesterday, only more wrinkled. A parade of soldiers without a war, actresses without a theater, poets without paper, and beggars craving a shred of love... We are not wholly good, nor wholly bad...
MOG
(Steps right beside her, letting the bowler hat drop heavily to the floor)
...we are but creatures caught in a waltz of salt, onions, tarnished medals, and brightly colored cloths.
(The clock’s ticking begins to slow down, shifting into a low, heavy, heartbeat-like thumping. The glaring golden light fades softly into a twilight blue, finally returning to the deep, bible-black darkness of the beginning. The three characters huddle shoulder to shoulder at center stage, swaying gently from left to right, as if their bodies were drifting at sea).
CAPI
(Very softly, lowering his voice to a dark, musical whisper)
The day goes out like a smoked herring in the water. Close the germ-free shutters. Let the soldiers drift back to their trenches of sleep. Let the actresses lock away their tears in the dressing rooms of oblivion. Let the beggar-poets shelter under the blankets of silence. Captain Cat lowers himself into his bunk... and the wood... the wood closes over us... for the second time... tonight.
(The CAPTAIN raises a limp hand and gives one last, fractional, feather-light tap to the bell at his waist).
(THE CHIME OF THE BELL FADES INTO THE AIR)
(TOTAL DARKNESS)
