Under Milk Wood review, National Theatre: Michael Sheen whips up a storm with words

Michael Sheen has become the go-to man if you want to suggest unsettling, off-the-scale brilliance. There was his giggling, potty-mouthed Mozart in Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus at the Old Vic, and at the Young Vic his Hamlet, who had been sectioned and kept under close watch by the guards of a correctional facility. He’s also the guy for you if you want someone who will plunge that extra mile in the intensity of his portrayals of people from real life (David Frost, Tony Blair, Brian Clough, Kenneth Williams et al).

In Lyndsey Turner’s Olivier staging of Under Milk Wood, his galvanising presence and knack for whipping up a storm with words make a strong and emotionally satisfying case for this popular verse drama by Dylan Thomas. The taste for this Swansea-born author’s bardic manner quickly waned in the Fifties, not being to the liking of the less florid Movement crowd that superseded him.

The show is staged in the round. The idea is that we are in a care home. The dust sheets, spotted with paint, are being pulled back from the furniture after what has evidently been a redecoration job. A man enters in his pyjamas, bewildered. He is hauntingly played by Karl Johnson, who soon reappears in the kind of dark suit he wore during his 30 years as the local headmaster. The residents assemble and gradually resume their everyday activities – some of which remind you of the behaviour of the folk in the village, light-heartedly conceived of as having been declared insane by government inspectors. Captain Cat, the blind mariner mulling over his memories, becomes an old man patiently constructing a ship-in-a-bottle. He is played by the reliably superlative Welsh actor Anthony O’Donnell.

Into this dutifully Covid-careful environment (with its trolleys doubling as milk-floats etc) barges Michael Sheen as Owain Jenkins, who is David’s son. He’s aggressively intent on seeing his father, and a bit shamefaced that it is quite a while since he last did so. One of Dylan Thomas’s most anthologised poems begins with the line, “Do not go gentle into that good night”. You begin to see that Owain’s mission is to make sure that his father does not descend into dementia without a fight to hold onto his faculties. He thrusts an album of laminated photographs at his suited dad. He conjures up the world of Milk Wood at the old man, as if challenging him to remember.  He takes surreptitious swigs from the quarter bottle of whisky in his cardigan pocket.

I think that lying behind this interpretation is the memory of Poor Tom in King Lear, painting word pictures for the blinded Gloucester as he shepherds him on the road to Dover. Gloucester does not realise that Tom is the son he disowned. Sheen and Johnson bring a deeply haunting poignancy to the situation.

I have never seen a staging less likely to lapse into the twee, the eccentric or the pictorial. A big bravo to Michael Sheen.