Dylan Thomas: Return Journey

The intonation, the booming voice, the musical delivery—Bob Kingdom’s performance is beautiful. With only a podium, a glass of water a chair and some simple lighting to help, Kingdom is as charming, captivating and pathetic as Thomas himself. Of course it’s all about the words; that extraordinary lyricism that was a smack in the face to the spare, adjective-free, skeletal verse of the early 20^thCentury. Dylan Thomas adored language, swimming through his lexicon with unnatural grace. Outside that native place inside his head, on the dry land of the real world of human interaction, he floundered like a landed seal. That combination of the height of literacy with abject human failure was what drew people to see Thomas’ lecture tours in the first place, and it’s this that Kingdom conveys so well.

Thomas’ most famous poems are all there, leavened with amusing anecdotes at the poet’s own expense. He wrote, straight from his id, of vital human drives and needs: youth and innocence, love, lust, impotence and death. The language is dense and sometimes opaque. At times, it feels as though the sound of the words is almost more important than the syntax and Thomas can be hard to understand even with the luxury of time to analyse, and we in 2015 have shorter attention spans than any audience in 1990 when Kingdom first performed this show, let alone 1953. What feels like a barrage of language is best dealt with by closing your eyes and being swept along by the mellifluence.

It’s a melancholic irony that Bob Kingdom has been performing this final lecture tour for longer than Thomas’ entire poetic career, and Kingdom is now visually much older than the poet was at his death. Kingdom’s is a powerful, timeless performance, well-polished but not polished dull. Anyone who appreciates language will love this show.

Cathy Bannister.

Photographer: Arthur Foster