In the introduction to this remarkable collection of works by and about Dylan Thomas, the Welsh actor Matthew Rhys – who played Thomas in the film The Edge of Love – reflects on the life and legacy of “the 20th century’s first rock star author, famed for his dazzling, imaginative poetry and chaotic personal life”. Thomas, who influenced Bob Dylan and the Beatles, loved radio and delivered a series of BBC broadcasts in the 1940s and early 50s which took in poems, short stories, critical appreciations and reminiscences of his Welsh childhood.
Many of those recordings feature here, including Holiday Memory, a nostalgia-soaked portrait of a sunny August bank holiday in Swansea, and Quite Early One Morning, about a man’s dawn walk through the streets of a seaside town “like a stranger come out of the sea, shrugging off weed and wave and darkness with each step”. In A Visit to America, recorded weeks before the author’s death in 1953 at the age of 39, Thomas relives a recent US lecture tour awash with “exhibitionists, polemicists, histrionic publicists, theological rhetoricians, historical hoddy-doddies, balletomanes, ulterior decorators, windbags and bigwigs and humbugs”.
But the spellbinding centrepiece is Thomas’s Under Milk Wood, recorded in 1963, with its famous opening words: “To begin at the beginning.” Starring Richard Burton alongside an all-Welsh cast, it documents a day in the life of a fictional fishing village, opening on “a spring moonless night … starless and bible black” when the villagers are asleep and dreaming. Burton is in his element: solemn, declamatory, drawing out the musicality of Thomas’s language and savouring every word.
• Dylan Thomas: The BBC Radio Collection is available on BBC Audio, 11hr 49min
Further listening
Fool Me Once
Harlan Coben, Random House, 10hr 4min
January Lavoy reads Coben’s thriller, recently adapted for TV, in which a newly widowed mother gets a shock when her dead husband appears on her nanny-cam cuddling their infant daughter.
Charles III
Robert Hardman, Macmillan, 14hr 5min
The story of the British monarch’s first year on the throne in a time of political upheaval, family rifts and grief over the death of Elizabeth II. Read by the author.
