I’ve been thinking about the poet Dylan Thomas recently so something a bit different today. Thinking about Thomas isn’t totally random, as I’ve studied and taught on him before, but in addition to thinking it may be time for a re-evaluation of lots of elements of the poet’s life, particularly his image and his film and radio work (watch out for upcoming posts where I tackle those fascinating subjects), I got to wondering if he might be inadvertently responsible for one of the most annoying political tics of today.
Since the 70’s and Margaret Thatcher’s voice register lowering for authority, the media training for politicians has grown and grown in importance, and one of the ubiquitous approaches taken by almost every politician since Tony Blair popularised (or the opposite) it, is the beginning of answers to any question with “Look… “, or “Listen…”, and then usually changing the subject. Listen for it. It’s annoying as hell once you realise how often it happens. It is a distraction technique, and partly to separate the (non) answer from the question and break the momentum of questioning, but it is also an effective way of engaging with an audience. As developed and delivered, to great effect, by Dylan Thomas in the play for voices Under Milk Wood.
Thomas was a massive cinephile, and loved the scripts and film theory of Eisenstein (he of Battleship Potemkin fame), which he used himself in his film scripts and the evolution of the techniques that found such success in Under Milk Wood. There isn’t space in a blog to explore the complete history, but suffice to say that DT’s ambition was to be able to create a new type of film script, which could be published as literature in it’s own right (he succeeded – The Doctor and The Devils was the first script ever published before it was produced), which would contain all stage and camera directions in the text itself, and would allow the author to direct his audience to imagine and construct their visualisation and understanding of the words exactly as the author intended. He described it as a “film without pictures”. The aim was to connect directly with each individual audience member, and to guide where they ‘looked’ and ‘listened’ to exactly those images the author wanted. Here are a few examples of the approach from Milk Wood;
Only your eyes are unclosed to see the black and folded town fast, and slow, asleep.
And you alone can hear the invisible starfall…
Listen. It is night moving in the streets… Listen. It is night in the chill, squat chapel, hymning in bonnet and brooch and bombazine black… Look. It is night, dumbly, royally winding though the Coronation cherry trees…
Come closer now.
Only you can hear the houses sleeping in the streets… Only you can see in the blinded bedrooms… Only you can hear and see, behind the eyes of the sleepers, the movements and countries and mazes and colours and dismays and rainbows and tunes and wishes and flight and fall and despairs and big seas of their dreams.
It works wonderfully in the play, and takes the audience on a journey of delights, guided by the aptly named ‘First Voice’ narrator, but breaks the fourth wall so cleanly that the listener feels like they are being addressed directly, and that the words are meant for them individually (“Only your eyes…”, “you alone can hear…”). It creates a connection. What DT is essentially doing is reaching out to every single audience member, speaking to them directly and clearly flagging ‘this is what you need to look at’, ‘this is what you need to listen to…’, breaking from whatever may have come before (in the politicians case, usually the question they want to avoid answering), and establishing a link between speaker and listener.
Listen, I don’t know for certain how this technique embedded itself in media training but look, the success of the original delivery, which is perhaps as popular today as it was eighty odd years ago when it was first developed, would seem to have a direct link with the stylistic development of Dylan Thomas. It would be one of his lesser, and less welcome achievements but, look, perhaps now is the time we should re-evaluate Thomas, and consider the (many) facets and achievements that made him such a wonderful writer and creator.
I suspect I’ll take up the challenge myself, and over the coming months, you can expect a few more blogs about Thomas’s lesser known achievements and talents.
Stay safe,
Kit x