Tankers, Tugs and
Banana Boats
adapted by Adrian Metcalfe
a walking tour of The Burrows and
Marina areas of Swansea
based on the works of Dylan Thomas
Meeting Point and Prologue – Dylan Thomas Square by the DTTheatre
There are three actors dressed in Forties style costumes; one actor acts as the back marker during the walk, but this role changes through the course of the walk. One is playing The Narrator, there are two other actors; Actor Two is a woman, and Actor Three is a man. Actor One acts as both tour guide and Dylan Thomas.
The piece starts with a brief welcome and explanation of the event (yet to be written). This will include a brief introduction to Dylan's connection with the sea and the provenance of the title. The Actor that acts as the Barmaid will take the order from the group and go the first venue (the Queens). She will then line up the beers on the bar as Actor One and Actor Three begin by reciting a marine poem by Dylan to demonstrate his love of sea-based words. At the end of each section(except the last of course!), Actor Two will proceed to the next bar ahead of the group to buy the beers.
Actor Three: This is a poem called 'Prologue':
This day winding down now
At God speeded summer's end
In the torrent salmon sun,
In my seashaken house
On a breakneck of rocks
Tangled with chirrup and fruit,
Froth, flute, fin, and quill
At a wood's dancing hoof,
By scummed, starfish sands
With their fishwife cross
Gulls, pipers, cockles, and snails,
Out there, crow black, men
Tackled with clouds, who kneel
To the sunset nets,
Actor One: Geese nearly in heaven, boys
Stabbing, and herons, and shells
That speak seven seas,
Eternal waters away
From the cities of nine
Days' night whose towers will catch
In the religious wind
Like stalks of tall, dry straw,
At poor peace I sing
To you strangers...
And if you understood that, you're a better man than I, Gunga Din! Come on let's go....And see our first bar-room scene.
They walk to The Queen's Hotel
Part One – Under Milk Wood; In the bar of The Queen's Hotel
Actor One: We begin with a scene from Dylan's classic work, Under Milk Wood. A scene played out almost every night in almost every seaside pub in Wales.....Cherry Owen, sober as Sunday as he is every day of the week, goes off happy as Saturday to get drunk as a deacon as he does every night.
Actor Three: I always say she's got two husbands,
Actor One: says Cherry Owen,
Actor Three: one drunk and one sober.
Actor Two: And aren't I a lucky woman? Because I love them both.
Actor One: Evening, Cherry.
Actor Three: Evening, Sinbad.
Actor One: What'll you have?
Actor Three: Too much.
Actor One: The Sailors Arms is always open...
Actor Two: Sinbad suffers to himself, heartbroken,
Actor One:...oh, Gossamer, open yours!
Actor Two: The drinkers in the Sailors Arms drink to the failure of the dance.
Actor One: Down with the waltzing and the skipping.
Actor Three: Dancing isn't natural,
Actor Two: righteously says Cherry Owen who has just downed seventeen pints of flat, warm, thin, Welsh, bitter beer. Mr Waldo, in his corner of the Sailors Arms, sings:
Actor One: (sings, yes that is what I wrote, sings...)
In Pembroke City when I was young
I lived by the Castle Keep
Sixpence a week was my wages
For working for the chimbley-sweep.
Six cold pennies he
gave me Not a farthing more or less
And all the fare I could afford
Was parsnip gin and watercress.
Sweep sweep chimbley sweep,
I wept through Pembroke City
Poor and barefoot in the snow
Till a kind young woman took pity.
Poor little chimbley sweep she said
Black as the ace of spades
O nobody's swept my chimbley
Since my husband went his ways
Come and sweep my chimbley
Come and sweep my chimbley
She sighed to me with a blush
Come and sweep my chimbley
Come and sweep my chimbley
Bring along your chimbley brush!
(During the song, Actor Two has left to organise the drinks in the next venue. At the end of the song, Actor Three instigates raucous drunken applause for the song – somebody will have to!)
Actor Three: Ladies and Gentlemen, let us proceed to the next venue....
Part Two – Old Garbo; the bar of Morgan's Hotel
Actor Two: (from behind the bar) Ladies and Gentlemen. Welcome to Morgan's Hotel. This is the bar where the great and the good and the glitterati of Swansea meet, chat, discuss business, politics, rugby, Premier League Football (for two seasons more than anyone in Cardiff), arts, crafts, love and death. So it is now in 2013. 70 years ago, in 1933, the same great, good and glitterati were meeting and discussing the very same things (except Premier League Football of course), but they did not meet here; they met in the famous Three Lamps Pub in Goat Street. An institution like no other, the stories about this public house, the men who attended it (and the women who were not supposed to) are legion. Sadly, neither the public house nor Goat Street survived the Three Nights' Blitz of 1941, but no homage to the pubs of Dylan's waterside town would be complete without a meeting with Freddie Farr Half Hook in Three Lamps....
Actor One: The back room of The Three Lamps was filled with elderly men. Mr. Farr had not yet arrived. I leant against the bar, between an alderman and a solicitor, drinking bitter, wishing that my father could see me now...and glad, at the same time, that he was visiting Uncle Albert in Aberavon. He could not fail to see that I was a boy no longer; he could not fail to be angry at the angle of my fag and my hat and the threat of the clutched tankard. I liked the taste of beer, I liked its live, white lather, its brass-bright depths, the sudden world through the wet brown walls of the glass, the tilted rush to the lips, and the slow swallowing down to the lapping belly, the salt on the tongue, the foam at the corners. (Addressing the line to the barmaid) Same again, Miss. She was middle-aged. (Addressing the line to the barmaid) One for you, miss?
Actor Two: Not during hours. Ta all the same.
Actor One: (Addressing the line to the barmaid) You're welcome. Was that an invitation to drink with her afterwards, to wait at the back door until she glided out, and then walk through the night along the promenade and sands, on to a soft dune where couples lay loving under their coats and looking at the Mumbles lighthouse? She was plump and plain, her netted hair was auburn and wisped with grey. She gave me my change like a mother giving her boy pennies for the pictures, and I would not go out with her if she put cream on it.
Actor Three: (bustling into the scene/room) You're a pint man then?
Actor One: Good evening, Mr. Farr. Only now and then for a change. What's yours? Dirty night.
Actor Three: It's going to get a lot dirtier if I have my way. You wait 'til we get to the Fishguard. That's a pub, let me tell you. Iechyd Da! You can see the sailors knitting there. And the old fish-wives in The Jersey...well. I got to go the W man, I'm dying for some fresh air.
Actor One. Mr. Evans the Producer came in quickly through a side door hidden by curtains, whispered his drink, shielded it with his overcoat, swallowed it in secrecy.
Actor Three: Similar. And half for his nibs. What's going on outside?
Actor Two:(from outside the bar) Penny for the guy. (followed by a puking noise)
Actor Three: Toop little Twms from the Valleys. There'll be some puking here tonight. Get that down and let's get out of here.
The actors leave taking the audience with them
Part Three – Return Journey; Starts Outside The No Sign Bar
Actor One: It was a cold white day in Wind Street, and nothing to stop the wind slicing up from the docks, for where the squat and tall shops had shielded the town from the sea lay their blitzed flat graves marbled with snow and head-stoned with fences. Dogs delicate as cats on water, as though they had gloves on their paws, padded over the vanished buildings. Boys romped, calling high and clear, on top of a levelled chemist's and a shoe-shop, and a little girl, wearing a man's cap, threw a snowball in a chill deserted garden that had once been the Jug and Bottle of the Prince of Wales. The wind cut up the street with a soft sea-noise hanging on its arm, like a hooter in a muffler. I could see the swathed hill stepping out of the town, which you could never see properly before, and the powdered fields of the roofs of Milton Terrace and Watkin Street and Fullers Row. Fish-frailed, netbagged, umbrella'd, pixie-capped, fur-shoed, blue-nosed, puce-lipped, blinkered like drayhorses, scarved, mittened, galoshed, wearing everything but the cat's blanket, crushes of shopping women crunched in the little Lapland of the once grey drab street, blew and queued and yearned for hot tea, as I began my search through the Swansea town cold and early on that wicked February morning.
We walk into the pub and up the stairs to the bar. Standing behind the bar is Actor Two (in barmaid mode) and Actor Three is sitting in front of the bar in a 'I sit in this place all day every day' sort of way.
Actor One: I went into a pub. The bar was just opening, but already one customer puffed and shook at the counter with a full pint of half-frozen Tawe water in his wrapped-up hand. I said: 'Good Morning' and the barmaid, polishing the counter vigorously as though it were a rare and valuable piece of Swansea china, said to her first customer...
Actor Two: Seen the film at the Elysium Mr. Griffiths there's snow isn't it did you come up on your bicycle our pipes burst Monday...
Actor One: A pint of bitter, please.
Actor Two: Proper little lake in the kitchen got to wear your Wellingtons when you boil an egg one and four please...
Actor Three: The cold gets me just here...
Actor Two:...and eightpence change that's your liver Mr. Griffiths you been on the cocoa again...
Actor One: I wonder whether you remember a friend of mine? He always used to come to this bar, some years ago. Every morning about this time.
Actor Three: Just by here it gets me. I don't know what'd happen if I didn't wear a band...
Actor Two: What's his name?
Actor One: Young Thomas
Actor Two: Lots of Thomases come in here. It's a kind of home from home for Thomases isn't it Mr. Griffiths. What's he look like?
Actor One: He'd be about seventeen or eighteen...
Actor Two:...I was seventeen once...
Actor One: ...and above medium height. Well, above medium height for Wales, I mean, he's five foot six and a half. Thick blubber lips; snub nose; curly mousebrown hair; one front tooth broken after playing a game called Cats and Dogs in the Mermaid, Mumbles; speaks rather fancy; truculent; plausible; a bit of a shower-off; plus-fours and no breakfast, you know; used to have poems printed in the Herald of Wales; there was one about an open-air performance of Electra in Mrs. Bertie Perkins's garden in Sketty; lived up the Uplands; a bombastic adolescent provincial Bohemian with a thick-knotted artist's tie made out of his sister's scarf, she never knew where it had gone, and a cricket shirt dyed bottle-green; a gabbing, ambitious, mock-tough, pretentious young man; and mole-y too.
Actor Two: There's words, what d'you want to find him for? I wouldn't touch him with a barge pole...would you, Mr. Griffiths? Mind you, you never can tell. I remember a man came here with a monkey. Called for an 'arf for himself and a pint for the monkey. And he wasn't Italian at all. Spoke Welsh like a preacher.
Actor One: The bar was filling up. Snowy business bellies pressed their watch-chains against the counter; black business bowlers, damp and white now as Christmas puddings in their cloths, bobbed in front of the misty mirrors. The voice of commerce rang sternly through the lounge.
Actor Three: Cold enough for you?
Actor Two: How's your pipes, Mr. Griffiths?
Actor Three: Another winter like this'll put paid to me Mrs. Evans. I got the 'flu....Make it a double then, will you love?...
Actor Two: Ok, babes...
Actor Three: I seem to remember a chap like you described. There couldn't be two like him – let's hope. He used to work as a reporter Down the Three Lamps I used to see him. Lifting his ikkle elbow (confidentially).
Actor One: What's The Three Lamps like now?
Actor Three: It isn't like anything. It isn't there. It's nothing mun. You remember Ben Evans's Stores? It's right next door to that. Ben Evans isn't there either...
Actor One: So, I went out of the bar, out into the snow and walked out of Wind Street, past all the flat white wastes where all the shops had been.
The scene finishes with
Actor One: Ladies and Gentlemen. That brings us to the end of this small sojourn into the watery world of Dylan. We hope that you have enjoyed yourselves as much as we have. Before we go to let you enjoy a small libation and you start lifting your own 'ikkle elbow', we would like to leave you with one of Dylan's poems, a poem that lets us all know why he does the things he does, and why – in the end – it is all completely pointless! It's called In my Craft or Sullen Art...
Actor Two: In my craft or sullen art
Exercised in the still night
When only the moon rages
And the lovers lie abed
With all their griefs in their arms
I labour by singing light
Not for ambition or bread
Or the strut and trade of charms
On the ivory stages
But for the lovers
Their arms around the griefs of the ages
Who pay no praise nor wages
Nor heed my craft or art. Finis