Audio Sample

Dylan Thomas

The Essential Dylan Thomas

Poems and stories

Read by Richard Burton, Philip Madoc, Richard Bebb & Jason Hughes

unabridged

This varied, well-chosen selection brings onto one CD set the best of Dylan Thomas. Here is the legendary recording of Under Milk Wood, with Richard Burton and Richard Bebb as narrators; but here also are two radio productions he wrote before that great classic, and though interesting in their own right, they show how Under Milk Wood grew gradually in his imagination. Thomas was a charismatic if idiosyncratic performer of his own poetry and stories and here is a representative selection. Performances of Dylan Thomas have since moved on and the greatness of the writer as a poet and storyteller are perhaps best heard in new recordings by actors of our own time. Here Bebb, Madoc, and Hughes share some of Thomas’s finest, most challenging and endearing works.

4 CDs

Running Time: 4 h 53 m

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More product details

ISBN:	978-962-634-343-2
Digital ISBN:	978-962-954-613-7
Cat. no.:	NA434312
Download size:	133 MB
BISAC:	POE000000
Released:	December 2004

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Richard Burton

Titles read by Richard Burton

Titles read by Richard Burton: The Essential Dylan Thomas (unabridged); Under Milk Wood and other plays (unabridged)

Philip Madoc

Philip Madoc’s extensive theatre work includes the roles of Othello and Iago, Faust and Macbeth and, with the RSC, The Duke in Measure for Measure and Professor Raat in The Blue Angel. TV roles include Lloyd George, Magua in The Last of the Mohicans, Brookside and A Mind to Kill. He reads The Death of Arthur, Canterbury Tales I and the part of Host in Canterbury Tales II, Arabian Nights, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, The Old Testament, Romeo and Juliet and The Essential Dylan Thomas for Naxos AudioBooks.

Titles read by Philip Madoc

Titles read by Philip Madoc: The Arabian Nights (abridged); The Canterbury Tales II (unabridged); The Canterbury Tales III (unabridged); The Canterbury Tales (unabridged); The Death of Arthur (Le Morte d’Arthur) (abridged); The Decline & Fall of the Roman Empire – Part 1 (abridged); The Decline & Fall of the Roman Empire – Part 2 (abridged); The Essential Dylan Thomas (unabridged); A Family Christmas (unabridged); The General Prologue & The Physician’s Tale (unabridged); The Moon of Gomrath (unabridged); The Old Testament (selections); Poems of the Orient (selections); Romeo and Juliet (unabridged); Samson Agonistes (unabridged); The Weirdstone of Brisingamen (unabridged)

Richard Bebb

Born in London in 1927, Richard Bebb was educated at Highgate School and Trinity College, Cambridge. He became an actor in 1947 in Michael Redgrave’s Macbeth and then spent two years in repertory at Buxton and Croydon, where he met his future wife, the late Gwen Watford. They married in 1952 and had two sons. From 1950 he worked regularly in all the theatrical media. He has appeared in a handful of West End plays, made over a thousand broadcasts, including sharing the narration with Richard Burton in the BBC recording of Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood and also appeared in almost two hundred television plays, including Alan Bennett’s A Question of Attribution; among other television appearances were Barchester Towers and Agatha Christie’s A Murder Has Been Announced. His one important film appearance was as the successful cricketer in Terence Rattigan’s The Final Test. He owns the largest collection of historic 78s of opera singers in England and has lectured at Yale, Harvard, Princetown and the Smithsonion on theatrical and musical subjects. He discovered the unknown cylinder recordings of Sir Henry Irving.

Titles read by Richard Bebb

Titles read by Richard Bebb: The Essential Dylan Thomas (unabridged); The General Prologue & The Physician’s Tale (unabridged); The Knyghte’s Tale (unabridged); The Pardoners Tale (unabridged); Under Milk Wood and other plays (unabridged)

Jason Hughes

Jason Hughes trained at LAMDA. His theatre credits include Design For Living directed by Sir Peter Hall, Caligula directed by Peter Grandage and Look Back in Anger. His numerous television appearances include Waking The Dead, Casualty, The Bill, Peak Practice and London’s Burning.

Titles read by Jason Hughes

Titles read by Jason Hughes: The Essential Dylan Thomas (unabridged)

Included in this title

Under Milk Wood
Return Journey To Swansea
Quite Early One Morning
Memories of Christmas
The Peaches
A Visit To Grandpa’s
The Followers
The Outing – A Story

Reviews

Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award

In the mid-20th century, Dylan Thomas (1914–1953) was at once excoriated for his wild booze-drenched antics and admired for his distinctive poems, essays, stories and lectures. Saturated in the musical speech of Wales, they dazzle with lush imagery, cascading sonorities, heady earthiness and bold flourishes. This aural collection exemplifies the traits that continue to gain him rapturous fans, particularly for his poetry. The radio play Under Milk Wood, his most famous work, is represented here by the legendary 1954 BBC production starring Richard Burton with an all-Welsh cast. Burton took the role that Thomas himself would have played had he not died just two months before the broadcast. In overripe stentorian tones that seem the perfect match to his writing, Thomas frequently recited his own works on radio and in personal appearances. This anthology includes vintage recordings of the author reading various pieces in his inimitable style, including ‘Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night’, which no one can deliver as movingly as he. Four seasoned Anglo-Welsh actors divide the remaining selections among themselves. Students and others coming to Thomas for the first time are well advised to start with this volume; those familiar with his works do not need to be told of the rewards awaiting them here.

Y.R., AudioFile