‘An Explosive Performing Force’: the Actor in Dylan Thomas

2014 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-16
Author(s):  
Gwynne Edwards

From his childhood in Swansea until his death in New York in 1953, Dylan Thomas was an instinctive actor. During his teenage years he acted in more than twenty-three stage productions, thirteen of them as a member of Swansea's Little Theatre Company. Although his roles were essentially English and his speaking style somewhat mannered, the latter was strongly influenced by the rhythms of the Welsh language spoken by family members and experienced in the chapels of his childhood. Subsequently, radio broadcasts of his poetry and short stories were very much those of an actor, the emphasis on the voice and, in the stories, on the presentation of many varied characters, of which his play for voices, Under Milk Wood, is the supreme example. But Thomas also carried his love of performance into his everyday life, playing the fool and acting outrageously at parties and in pubs. The comment of one of his contemporaries that ‘Dylan was an actor; he acted practically every moment of every day’ could not be nearer the mark. Gwynne Edwards is Emeritus Professor in the Department of European Languages at Aberystwyth University. He is also a playwright, and two of his adaptations of short stories by Dylan Thomas – ‘The Peaches’ and ‘Extraordinary Little Cough’ – have recently been performed by the Swansea Little Theatre Company as part of the Dylan Thomas centenary celebrations.

Five Centuries of Spanish Literature: From the Cid Through the Golden Age. An Anthology Selected and Edited for Students of Spanish by Linton Lomas Barrett. New York — Toronto, Dodd, Mead & Company, 1962; An Outline History of Spanish American Literature, Third Edition, Englekirk, Leonard, Reid and Crow. New York, Appleton-Century- Crofts, 1965; Lecturas Intermedias: Prosas Y Poesias, Anderson, Davison, Smith. New York, Harper & Row, 1965; Los Duendes Deterministas Y Otors Cuentos, Enrique Anderson Imbert, Edited by John Y. Falconieri. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, Prentice-Hall, 1965; Hoy Es Fiesta, Antonio Buero Vallejo. Edited by J. E. Lyon, With Vocabulary by K. S. B. Croft. London, George G. Harrap (Toronto, Clarke, Irwin), 1964; Voces Españolas de Hoy, Edited by Duran and Alvarez. New York, Harcourt, Brace & World (Toronto, Longmans Canada), 1965; Selecciones (Textes Espagnols À L’usage Des Canadiens-Français; Spanish Readings for English-Canadian Students), S. Fielden-Briggs. Montreal, Beauchemin, 1965; Cuentos Americanos de Nuestros Dias: Ten Spanish American Short Stories, Edited by Jean Franco. London, Harrap (Toronto, Clarke, Irwin), 1965; La España Moderna Vista Y Sentida Por Los Españoles, Edited by Thomas R. Hart and Oarlos Rojas. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, Prentice-Hall, 1966; Don Brazazo de La Carretera: An Elementary Spanish Reader, Richard Musman. London, G. Bell and Sons (Toronto, Clarke, Irwin), 1964; Ortega Y Gasset: Sus Mejores Paginas, Edited by Manuel Durán. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, Prentice-Hall, 1966; de Cela a Castillo-Navarro: Veinte Años de Prosa Española Contemporanea, Edited by Carlos Rojas. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, Prentice-Hall, 1965; Palabras Modernas, J. R. Jump. London, George G. Harrap (Toronto, Clarke, Irwin), 1965;Five Centuries of Spanish Literature : From the Cid Through the Golden Age. An Anthology Selected and Edited for Students of Spanish by Linton Lomas Barrett. New York — Toronto, Dodd, Mead & Company, 1962. Pp. x, 352.An Outline History of Spanish American Literature, Third Edition, Englekirk, Leonard, Reid and Crow. New York, Appleton-Century- Crofts, 1965. Pp. xiii, 252. $2.95.Lecturas Intermedias: Prosas y Poesias, Anderson, Davison, Smith. New York, Harper & Row, 1965. Pp. x, 333. (Plus Instructor’s Manual, 75 pages.)Los Duendes Deterministas y Otors Cuentos, Enrique Anderson Imbert, Edited by John Y. Falconieri. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, Prentice-Hall, 1965, Pp. ix, 192. $3.75.Hoy Es Fiesta, Antonio Buero Vallejo. Edited by J. E. Lyon, with vocabulary by K. S. B. Croft. London, George G. Harrap (Toronto, Clarke, Irwin), 1964, Pp. 192. $2.25.Voces Españolas de Hoy, edited by Duran and Alvarez. New York, Harcourt, Brace & World (Toronto, Longmans Canada), 1965. Pp. vili, 216. $3.25.Selecciones (textes espagnols à l’usage des canadiens-français; Spanish readings for English-Canadian Students), S. Fielden-Briggs. Montreal, Beauchemin, 1965. Pp. 149.Cuentos Americanos de Nuestros Dias: Ten Spanish American Short Stories, edited by Jean Franco. London, Harrap (Toronto, Clarke, Irwin), 1965. Pp. 179. $2.55.La España Moderna Vista y Sentida por Los Españoles, edited by Thomas R. Hart and Oarlos Rojas. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, Prentice-Hall, 1966. Pp. xiii, 341. $5.95.Don Brazazo de la Carretera: An Elementary Spanish Reader, Richard Musman. London, G. Bell and Sons (Toronto, Clarke, Irwin), 1964. Pp. 96. $0.95.Ortega y Gasset: SUS Mejores Paginas, edited by Manuel Durán. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, Prentice-Hall, 1966. Pp. vi, 250. $3.95.De Cela a Castillo-Navarro: Veinte Años de Prosa Española Contemporanea, edited by Carlos Rojas. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, Prentice-Hall, 1965. Pp. ix, 213. $2.95.Palabras Modernas, J. R. Jump. London, George G. Harrap (Toronto, Clarke, Irwin), 1965. Pp. 85. $1.10.

Author(s):  
J. H. P.

2016 ◽  
pp. 100-107
Author(s):  
Maria Gubińska

The paper presents the phenomenon of hybridity present in Assia Djebar’s writings based on the example of the collection of short stories entitled Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement (Women of Algiers in Their Apartment). The title of the collection makes reference to famous paintings by Delacroix and Picasso but in doing so the author also supplements the Europocentric discourse with her own voice, the voice of a Francophone Algerian writer who, holding a dialogue with the painters, breaks with exoticism and the orientalising European approach. The dialogue with painting is accomplished on two levels; the first, diegetic and second, essayistic; in ‘The Overture’, and especially in ‘The Afterword’, which is not only a commentary to the painting works by Delacroix and Picasso, but also a complementation of the literary plot. The permanent link of Djebar’s writings to the dramatic present and the remembrance of the women deprived of their voice and subjected to reification is voiced powerfully in the work, which cannot be easily evaluated as it is very diverse in its references to other fields of art.


Aschkenas ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Joachim Schlör

AbstractThe idea to create and stage a play called »Heimat im Koffer« – »A home in the suitcase« – emerged, I presume, in Vienna shortly before Austria became part of National Socialist Germany in 1938: the plot involved the magical translocation of a typical Viennese coffeehouse, with all its inhabitants and with the songs they sang, to New York; their confrontation with American everyday life and musical traditions would create the humorous situations the authors hoped for. Since 1933, Robert Gilbert (Robert David Winterfeld, 1899–1978), the son of a famous Jewish musician and himself a most successful writer of popular music for film and operetta in Weimar Germany, found himself in exile in Vienna where he cooperated with the journalist Rudolf Weys (1898–1978) and the piano artist Hermann Leopoldi (1888–1959). Whereas Gilbert and Leopoldi emigrated to the United States and became a part of the German-Jewish and Austrian-Jewish emigré community of New York – summarizing their experience in a song about the difficulty to acquire the new language, »Da wär’s halt gut, wenn man Englisch könnt« (1943) – Weys survived the war years in Vienna. After 1945, Gilbert and Weys renewed their contact and discussed – in letters kept today within the collection of the Viennese Rathausbibliothek – the possibility to finally put »Heimat im Koffer« on stage. The experiences of exile, it turned out, proved to be too strong, and maybe too serious, for the harmless play to be realized, but the letters do give a fascinating insight into everyday-life during emigration, including the need to learn English properly, and into the impossibility to reconnect to the former life and art.


2021 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 125-154
Author(s):  
Marieke Meelen ◽  
David Willis

This article introduces the working methods of the Parsed Historical Corpus of the Welsh Language (PARSHCWL). The corpus is designed to provide researchers with a tool for automatic exhaustive extraction of instances of grammatical structures from Middle and Modern Welsh texts in a way comparable to similar tools that already exist for various European languages. The major features of the corpus are outlined, along with the overall architecture of the workflow needed for a team of researchers to produce it. In this paper, the two first stages of the process, namely pre-processing of texts and automated part-of-speech (POS) tagging are discussed in some detail, focusing in particular on major issues involved in defining word boundaries and in defining a robust and useful tagset.


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