"UNDER MILK WOOD"

New Zealand Listener, Volume 32, Issue 810, 4 February 1955, Page 5

"UNDER MILK WOOD"

Sir-On Sunday evening, January 16, 1ZB presented Under Milk Wood, a Play for Voices, by. the late Dylan Thomas. Nothing in The Listener, and nothing at the time of the performance informed us that what we were listening to was a very heavily edited version of the original BBC Third Programme production. The play is roughly 1800 lines in length: the ZB version lopped off some 700 lines! This was done by omitting entirely one of the most delightful ballads, and by generally paring down most if not all the characters to meaningless proportions, It would be interesting to know who was responsible for this narrow piece of editing. It would be interesting to know who made the decision that what was, at the turn of a knob, freely available to British listeners was unsuitable for their New Zealand counterpart. A ZB time schedule is hardly warrant enough for removing the whole core of a play; and, indeed, when one examines the excluded section-"earthy and ripe," as the Times Literary Supplement commented, but no more than that-one suspects that time was not the argument. If the problem was one of "suitability" would it not have been better to have considered the play as a whole, to have expurgated it, rather than to have removed the apparently too solid flesh and then refrained from mentioning that what the listener was confronting was only a badly articulated skeleton. To play the magpie thus, to pick with a very suspect fastidiousness for the bright innocuous bits, is, I think, irresponsible and a little dishonest. An expurgated version of Under Milk Wood could hardly have had Thomas's ap-proval-one only needs to read the whole play or hear the complete BBC production to know that. Levels of appeal, grades of integritysurely the problem found implicit recognition in the setting up of the YA-YD-YC system. Do then the Commercial stations have no relation to this; no other standard than what they think will go"? Silently to edit an author’s work is to purvert his intention: that’s surely no new truth: In the case of Under Milk Wood the editing or expurgating made mock and confusion of what is at least a@ very considerable work. One wonders what silent and nameless censor made these decisions; how he reached them: what he may be working on now--Take It From Here. I don’t doubt’

MAURICE

DUGGAN

(Auckland).

(The version of Under Milk Wood broadcast by ZB stations on January 16-the only version so far available for broadcasting in New Zealand-was edited by the BBC for its Transcription Service.-Ed. )