“All the Christmases roll down towards the two-tongued sea, like a cold and headlong moon bundling down the sky that was our street.” Dylan Thomas, the great Welsh poet, created improbable images to illuminate our lived reality. Yet, however high his fantasy flies in his short story A Child’s Christmas in Wales, it is always tethered to physicality: sight, touch, taste and hearing; soul and body playing an exhilarating game of tug. How to stage this? The director Emma Rice, with members of her company, has found a way.
First, give it a stage setting favoured by poets past – the Elizabethan model of bare boards, an inner room that can be hidden by curtains (or doors), the roof of which doubles as a balcony (it’s a format Rice, who was previously artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe in London, knows well).
Second, deploy a talented ensemble (Tom Fox, Simon Oskarsson, Katy Owen, Robyn Sinclair), including musician/composer (Ian Ross) to create, for example, a snowscape from socks and crocheted doilies, and skaters on ice from enamel plates; scenes on and under water from projections, body movements and coloured lights (projection and light designs Simon Baker and Malcolm Rippeth respectively).
Mostly, though, make sure that the magical images – the merry and soulful dances and songs, and the silent-film style physical comedy – have a strong emotional undertow of joy, fear, wonder, and that particular form of melancholy yearning that the Welsh term hiraeth.
The tone is set by a framing device that has Thomas, as narrator, set down a beer to share his memories with us. In the role of Thomas, Owen seamlessly slips between poet and his boyhood self, showing, as the action progresses, the pain he feels at the contrast between what was and what is (not always skirting pathos).
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Last, involve the audience in singing hymns and folk songs in English and Welsh; also in actions – but no spoiling of surprises. The run may be sold out, but this show looks set to become an annual event.
A Child’s Christmas in Wales is at The Lucky Chance, Frome, until 21 December
Photograph by Steve Tanner