Under Milk Wood is on the National Theatre stage since June 16, but the press night took place last Wednesday (24), which has brought some good reviews to the production and Michael Sheen’s performance. You will find some reviews below, but before them, check out some photos from both the rehearsals and the play:
Now to the reviews:
Nor could you wish for a more loquacious, richer narrator than hirsute, woody-voiced Sheen, who looks like he’s been training outside an off-licence.
Evening Standard (4/5 stars)
A charismatic Michael Sheen is part showman, part shaman in this staging of Dylan Thomas’s 1954 radio play, conjuring a Welsh town into lyrical, beguiling life with mostly older actors on a bare stage.
Financial Times (4/5 stars)
That communal effort of recall is significant: this is a great ensemble piece, led by a very touching performance from Johnson and an outstanding one from Sheen. Stepping away from Richard Burton’s mesmerising delivery, he is sprightly, driven, springing about the stage, listening intently, catching the mood of the moment, rolling the rich words across the stage like marbles. His performance is magnetic and charged with emotion, the moment of breakthrough between father and son immensely moving.
The Guardian (3/5 stars)
It comes with an inventive framing device (additional material is written by Siân Owen) in which Sheen plays the son of Richard Jenkins (Karl Johnson), who is losing his bearings when he is visited by Jenkins Junior in his nursing home. Thomas’s narrative is used to jog Jenkins’s memory and bring him back to the present moment, and to his son. The father-son relationship contains powerful undercurrents of tension and unspoken history, and is movingly performed by both actors.
i newspaper (4 stars)
Sheen’s delivery is masterly, full of richness and relish, as lust and longing mingle with domesticity and parochial routine: the loneliness and love among hot water bottles and flannel sheets, the illicit encounters in woods and meadows, the church bells, clocks, kettles, and cats, the frying bacon and the simmering passions.
The Independent (4/5 stars)
In Lyndsey Turner’s Olivier staging of Under Milk Wood, his galvanising presence and knack for whipping up a storm with words make a strong and emotionally satisfying case for this popular verse drama by Dylan Thomas. The taste for this Swansea-born author’s bardic manner quickly waned in the Fifties, not being to the liking of the less florid Movement crowd that superseded him.
Telegraph (4/5 stars)
Brandishing a photo-album, Sheen’s character is on a mission to communicate, stimulate and (just a little) recriminate. As he jabs at old pictures, he implores his da to cast his mind back.
And this is a very good, detailed performance of it – Sheen is impassioned and urgent, like he’s electrified by the surging flanguage