Recitation in Manhattan

A Boy Growing Up is Actor Emlyn Williams reciting or interpreting or impersonating Dylan Thomas' tales of his "young dog" days--at least for a while. After that, performer and storyteller triumphantly become one. On a stage with a single chair. Williams expands into a lusty segment of Wales, a mad but exact re-creation of childhood, a whole lurching animal-orchestra of fun. Williams is Dylan Thomas and Thomas' characters and Thomas as a character. But quite as deftly as he has dug into the people,

Williams has dug into the prose, focusing every sharp-eyed, cockeyed image, finding a broomstick for every daffy, airborne prank, split-seconding every sottish or schoolboy joke.

The material has its relatively weak moments, the performer his slightly too showy ones; but the good things blot them out. For Williams can make a small event of a mere phrase like "She held her head as though it might spill." He can make a larger one of Thomas' imagining how his old schoolmaster might remember him:

He cribbed, mitched, spilt ink, rattled his desk . . .

he could smudge, hedge, smirk, wriggle, wince,

whimper, blarney, badger, blush, deceive, be

devious, stammer, improvise, assume

offended dignity or righteous indignation as though to the manner born . . .

appeared regularly in detention classes,

hid in the cloakroom during algebra . . .

and, as might be expected, edited the school magazine.

But it is in something longer, headier, woozier--such as the tale of a small Dylan accompanying a busload of revelers on a daylong ride from one pub to another, till "dusk came down warm and gentle on thirty wild, wet, pickled, splashing men without a care in the world at the end of the world in the West of Wales"--that Williams gathers more momentum and garners a real harvest of laughs.

And from the often marvelously demented first part of Adventures in the Skin Trade, Williams gets his best turn of the evening. Here a Welsh youth reaches London, makes friends in the railway-station restaurant, and goes to a furniture dealer's crammed house where "chairs stood on couches that lay on tables" and conversation went on while people bounced up and down on spring mattresses or were hidden behind columns of chairs. At length the young man found himself in a locked bathroom with a girl trying to lure him into the tub with her. Here an evening that has bubbled nostalgically and caromed and swayed explodes into gorgeous nonsense.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.