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Bob Kingdom channels Dylan Thomas
BY SALLY CRAGIN
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Long after his death, poet Dylan Thomas casts a lengthy shadow. His verse continues to be read and his plays continue to be performed, and the terrain around "Fern Hill" remains heartbreakingly true and "ever relevant," according to Welsh actor Bob Kingdom, who’s touring Dylan Thomas: Return Journey, a solo performance about the bard that he’s been performing for 15 years and that he’ll bring to Jimmy Tingle’s Off Broadway next weekend. Originally directed by Anthony Hopkins, this show, co-written by the performer and Neil Bartlett, depicts the poet on the eve of his final American sojourn. "The last before the White Horse Pub and the legendary 17 whiskies," as Kingdom puts it, referring to the poet’s notorious New York demise from alcohol poisoning. Kingdom is currently on his own North American tour, which coincides with the 50th anniversary of Thomas’s fatal collapse at 39. "Dylan was hopeless at anything else but poetry," he goes on to explain. "Domestic things he wasn’t very good at. He should have lived in an age of patronage like the Esterhazys." Instead, Thomas became — like his Irish contemporary Brendan Behan — a willing participant in his own self-destruction. "It’s biographical in that I allow many of his words and stories to transport the narrative. I’m communicating this man’s obsession with words, and after a while it becomes eerie, because words sort of . . . killed him." Yet those words are still intoxicating, even if you’ve heard them all your life. "In Wales, you grow up with Thomas," the performer says of his countryman. "The reprobate drunken poet is seductive, but now I realize it’s a waste of human resources." Kingdom, an actor and former ad man, finds he has plenty of energy for his impersonations. (His other shows are centered on Truman Capote, J. Edgar Hoover, and Elsa Maxwell.) "As long as I’ve got an audience, I don’t find it exhausting. When I put the wig on, I’m Dylan. I know what I have to do, and what words I have to say will sustain me." The power of words is what originally drew Kingdom to his subject, though he admits a fondness for "tragic obsessives." Thomas’s "themes about childhood and loss of innocence are monumental and universal and will always touch people and are topical in ways that aren’t fleeting." But Thomas’s talent was just one aspect of a complicated and vulnerable personality. "When you’re naked to your feelings, it’s quite alarming. You’re always reacting to things in words. You can’t just see a thing — you have to describe it all the time." In Return Journey, Kingdom intersperses verse with the events that are thought to have provided inspiration — for example, "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night" as an elegy Thomas wrote while his father was in the last stages of dying. But the effect the performer aims for is more impressionistic than biographical. "People are so pompous about their lives. We’ve lost this innocence and think we’ve got it all sussed, but a poem like ‘The Force That Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower’ twines us with nature. A poem should be a mystery — it shouldn’t be an instruction manual. Dylan’s poems proclaim a grand doubt." Dylan Thomas: Return Journey plays November 6 through 8 at Jimmy Tingle’s Off Broadway, 255 Elm Street in Davis Square. Tickets are $20 to $25; call (617) 591-1616.
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