Theater: Dance of Death

Dylan, by Sidney Michaels, covers Dylan Thomas’ last few years, when the man who had put his life force into his poetry was putting a death wish into his life. T. S. Eliot once said that to think of Dryden dying was like thinking of an empire falling. To see Dylan Thomas dying on the stage is like watching a once raging fire being extinguished. Even the alcoholic cause of death, a “wet brain,” chillingly suggests the dank dark extinction of the light of the mind.

This dying light is marvelously mirrored in the smoky anguish of Alec Guinness’ eyes, and it gives him the look of a man ravaged by the pain of being and the dread of not being. Perfectly miming every state of alcoholic disequilibrium, Guinness does a dance of death at ever-varying tempos. It can be antic, as when he pats the bottom of an Old Howard burlesque stripper in Boston, and reminds her that he will be reading his poems at Radcliffe. It can be a gallant agony of slow motion, as he disciplines drunken legs to march to the podium on his reading tours. It becomes the jabbing dance of the prize ring with Caitlin (Kate Reid), his wife and scarring partner, as their savage domestic infighting vividly creates the image of a marriage where words not only lead to blows but are blows. Kate Reid is shatteringly good in portraying the kind of woman who marries her author ego.

The play is not the equal of its star. It dwells on the collected anecdotes and cocktail parties of the lecture tours, the college-girls sedulously seeking Dylan’s sexual autograph, the bar-buddy publisher, the biographer (John Malcolm Brinnin) who invited, chaperoned and wrote about Dylan Thomas in America. But these are the faintest echo chambers for the conflict that split Thomas’ skull. The torment of the lyric poet is that lyric poetry is essentially a young man’s form. The time comes when the world must be seen more through the eyes of wisdom than of wonder. The romantic in Dylan Thomas would not or could not meet the demands and responsibilities of age. Dylan, the play, shadows the eternally youthful hell raiser, but only Alec Guinness, the actor, probes the special hell in which the man lived.