UNDER MILK WOOD

UNDER MILK WOOD

Guy Masterson

at the Civic Theatre

20.01.12

Guy Masterson has been carrying Llareggub around with him for something approaching twenty years. All the people of Dylan Thomas's sleepy seaside town, living inside his head, ready to spring to life in this remarkable theatrical experience. Now his one-man show must take a rest, and Friday's performance, to a near-capacity Civic, will be the last for some years.

It is a play for voices, and we discover the Welsh town first through the keen ears of sightless Captain Cat, standing in pyjamas and dark glasses on a kitchen chair isolated on a bible-black stage, as the men and women dream their revealing dreams. And the animals, too: moles, cats, carthorses and the rest. All vividly but economically suggested in a masterclass of narrative mime. Masterson's instruments are his mellifluous voice, aided by echo occasionally, and his eloquent hands. With them he conjures the characters and the moulted feathers of their dreams. The music and the soundscape [Matt Clifford] are helpful, but incidental.

The delights are legion – many of us, like the couple behind me, wait in pleasurable anticipation for our favourite lines, first learned in versions by Burton or by the poet himself. Like the awful Pughs, or Cherry Owen's cheerfully drunken homecoming, or the children's games, blithely skipping, shyly kissing on Llareggub Hill.

SHYLOCK

SHYLOCK

Guy Masterson at the Cramphorn Theatre

01.11.11

Jim Hutchon was in the Cramphorn ...

Guy Masterson has made a mission of producing and developing one-man plays for others which he launches on successful provincial tours throughout the UK and Europe.
On welcome occasions, he performs these himself, and this examination of Shakespeare's Jew is an example of his work at its finest and most revealing.
Unlike the current trend to 'rehabilitate' Shylock's temperament in sympathetic terms, Gareth Armstong's treatment is to neither blame nor acclaim, but instead, to reveal the rounded person and his history, warts and all.
Masterson is, above all, a master story teller and he had the audience in the palm of his hand from his first utterances.
They swayed forward as one in the quiet passages and rocked back in the furious ones.
And I doubt a single member of the full house left without a singularly modified picture of the Jew who tried but failed to redress the balance of his benighted race.

I, ELIZABETH

Dyad Productions

Cramphorn Theatre

12.05.11

Jim Hutchon was in the Cramphorn:

Any production with a Guy Masterson cachet is worth the trip out. He has produced a whole series of fine dramas, largely one person works. Actor Rebecca Vaughan, who we last saw in the spectacularly successful ‘Austen’s Women’, has assembled from a wide range of disparate sources, the thoughts and conversations of Elizabeth 1^st, from holding her own against the intellectuals of the day, to her private prayers and her innermost doubts.

The period Rebecca has chosen is curious. Not for her the drama of Elizabeth’s younger days, mother murdered and she cast out by her father Henry VIII, imprisoned by her sister and dubbed a bastard, or the later period of her glory against the Armada and the flowering of England as a superpower. Instead, she opted for the rather boring period in between where she is a largely unproven queen with suspicious and wary subjects.

The result is a declamation of great scholarship and meticulous research, but with not much drama for the audience to get a hold of. Rebecca is clearly a consummate actor with commanding voices, and while I applaud her dedication to talk non-stop for 90 minutes, she is not a natural story teller, so the result isn’t very ‘audience friendly’. It is erudite and wide-ranging, but not, I fear, theatre.

GOERING'S DEFENCE

at the Cramphorn Theatre

01.04.11

Bull-necked, jack-booted, Hermann Goering stands before us, a defiant, arrogant, thug. But also an honest airman, a heroic Siegfried, a lover of the theatre. A believer in power through truth; a loyal supported of Hitler from the earliest days.

It is his last night; he is about to cheat the hangman, win one last victory and finally find a kind of peace.

Ross Gurney-Randall's mesmerising performance switches from his bare cell to the Nuremburg courtroom, using verbatim extracts from the trial, with Goering answering the disembodied voice of prosecutor Jackson.

No German accent, no uniform, no scenery, no clever effects. Just the man, refusing to excuse or apologise, talking to us without pretence; the magic here is in the words [written by Gurney-Randall with Andrew Bailey and the director, Guy Masterson]. The most poetical passages were for the worst atrocities – the violence of the beer hall massacre, the searing images from the death camps – Himmler's baby, according to Goering's testimony.

This is no mere history lesson, though we do follow Hitler's right-hand man through the rise of Nazism to its defeat. Tomorrow belongs to his child Edda, he says, And as we live that tomorrow with her, we must never forget how easy it is for men like Hermann to persuade and pervert.

FERN HILL

Guy Masterson at the Cramphorn Theatre

21.01.10

One man, many characters. Biochemist turned actor Guy Masterson began with just a taste of Under Milk Wood, the solo show he brought here last year.

Then he was off exploring the rest of the oeuvre, mining the rich vein of Dylan Thomas's poetry and prose.

Beginning with “a slap of sea and a tickle of sand”, that glorious evocation of seasides past in Holiday Memory. Masterson peopled the beach with assorted families, plus a beautifully observed glum donkey. Spitting, snarling, slinking and sliding cats in the snow, with even more aunts, uncles and scampering kids in A Child's Christmas in Wales, which ended this superb performance all too soon.

Between these two solid bookends, a collection of poems, including Masterson's favourite, Fern Hill, the tragic Lament, and Thomas's musing on his work, In My Craft or Sullen Art.

Other delights were a third story, the hilarious but touching Visit to Grandpa's, and in a moment's breather between poems, a brilliant re-creation of the poet himself reading, and the famous Richard Burton First Voice.

And it was Under Milk Wood which provided a coda, a kind of benison:

Eli Jenkins' sunset poem.

Every morning when I wake,

Dear Lord, a little prayer I make,

O please to keep Thy lovely eye

On all poor creatures born to die

And every evening at sun-down

I ask a blessing on the town,

For whether we last the night or no

I'm sure is always touch-and-go.

We are not wholly bad or good

Who live our lives under Milk Wood,

And Thou, I know, wilt be the first

To see our best side, not our worst.

O let us see another day!

Bless us all this night, I pray,

And to the sun we all will bow

And say, good-bye--but just for now!

Hear Guy Masterson's Fern Hill

and Dylan Thomas's My Craft ...