Under Milk Woods [Drama On 3]

To mark the 70th anniversary of the first radio broadcast of Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood, five Welsh writers have written short drama portraits of their area of Wales in 2024. Joe Dunthorne (Swansea), Manon Steffan Ros (Tywyn), Menna Elfyn (New Quay), Hanan Issa (Cardiff) and Rachel Trezise (the Rhondda). Narrated by Ruth Jones, the cast includes Sophie Melville, Alan David, Ifan Huw Dafydd, Eiry Thomas, Gwion Morris Jones, Ioan Hefin and Lois Meleri Jones.

In 1938, Dylan Thomas proposed that a group of Welsh writers should prepare a verse-report for BBC radio in Wales of their ‘own particular town, village, or district'. This project was never realised, but it prompted Thomas himself to write radio portraits of New Quay in Ceredigion and Margate in Kent.

The notion of using radio to conjure a place he knew intimately was one that Thomas could never quite shake off. After various attempts at such a piece, and numerous drafts, his most celebrated work, Under Milk Wood, was finally completed 15 years later.

70 years after that first radio broadcast, on 25th January 1954, we pay homage to Thomas by bringing his original 1938 multi-voiced verse-report idea to life.

As with Thomas' play for voices, these poems are character-led, in the voices of people of today's Wales with all their idiosyncrasies, phrases, humour and language-switching.

Thomas's Under Milk Wood moves through the fictional town of Llareggub over the course of a single day, from before dawn to after dusk. Our five dramatic portraits follow this chronology, but shift location around Wales. They each take a line from Thomas as their starting point and their spur.

To mark the 70th anniversary of the first radio broadcast of Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood, five Welsh writers' short dramatic portraits of their area of Wales in 2024.