Guy Masterson
Under Milk Wood
Holden St Theatres
Sun 11 March
until Fri 30 March


Guy Masterson is again giving his one-man rendition of Dylan Thomas' classic play 'Under Milk Wood' a run at the Fringe and, again, it is a complete success.

Thomas' work involves a narrator or storyteller bringing the audience into a fictional Welsh village brimming with idiosyncratic but disturbingly believable characters. The play reveals the dreams, thoughts, and everyday interactions of these characters, sometimes through the ridiculously theatrical monologue of the narrator and sometimes through the characters themselves.

Being a one man show, however, everything in Masterson's version seems to be coming through the narrator. Though Masterson plays all the characters himself and switches between them brilliantly, it's difficult not to see each as simply the narrator pretending to be them - which is, of course, what is literally happening. In other hands this might have weakened the play's effect but Masterson is such a physically, comically, and emotionally dynamic performer that he has been able to maintain the vividness of the stuff being presented. This new form also serves to take important characteristics of the old form to a new level of layered-ness - what was an act about people whose lives were acts themselves is in Masterson's version an act (the play) about an act (the narrator acting) about an act (the village people's act-like lives).

Masterson and Holden Street Theatres deserve many thanks for bringing us work of such superior quality.

William McGinley