Without a unifying idea, or any considered appreciation of the text, this adaptation assumes the air of a strained community theatre project
Is it significant that, in Dylan Thomas’s centenary year, more effort has been made to dramatise the life – A Poet in New York on TV, Set Fire to the Stars in cinemas – rather than the work?
On the plus side, Kevin Allen’s new take on Thomas’s great radio fantasia of 1954 – available in simultaneously shot English- and Welsh-language versions, with Charlotte Church singing torch songs as Llareggub’s town sweetheart Polly Garter – proves more rooted in place and less literal-minded than its 1972 Burton-Taylor predecessor, which was a project born of a vanity denied the begrimed, dishevelled character actors gathered here.
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