DYLAN THOMAS’S entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography states that he considered his ‘play for voices’, Under Milk Wood, a poor relation to his poetry. Yet, with its array of characters, from Captain Cat dreaming of his lost loves to the twice-widowed, obsessively neat Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard, it is the work for which he is best known. Despite it only being first performed in the last year of his life, he had been working on an idea for a tale or play about a small Welsh seaside town since he was in his late teens.
The fictional town of Llareggub, (the ‘joke’, such as it is, lies in reading its name backwards) made its first appearance in the Surrealist story The Orchards, written in 1935, with references to ‘the reverend madmen in the Black Book of Llareggub’. Further inspiration arrived in 1938, when Thomas and his new bride, the dancer Caitlin Macnamara, moved to Laugharne on the Taf Estuary in Carmarthenshire. Clearly, he was fascinated by the inhabitants of what he called ‘the strangest town in Wales’, remarking to fellow resident and writer Richard Hughes (author of the bestseller A High Wind In Jamaica) that what the place really needed was ‘a play about well-known Laugharne characters’. His working title was The Town That Was Mad.
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