Purpose

Dylan Thomas wrote Under Milk Wood to be a play for voices, using the intricate words of English combined with his regional Welsh culture to create a sing-song snapshot of life in an idyllic, rural village. Dylan wrote the play in fragmented snippets in order to capture the experience of moving about a town and hearing different sounds and voices of the villagers living their lives.

Audience

The audience for this play was originally entirely hearing it over the airwaves, after the BBC commissioned Dylan Thomas to write their radio play.  It was later adapted to the stage and screen, including several movies. In modern times, the play has found new audiences in Zoom groups emulating the fragmented nature of the voices of the small country town. Broadly, Thomas aimed his work at those who loved poetry, wordplay, silliness and the sing-song interactions of the Welsh. 

Context

Dylan Thomas wrote Under Milk Wood in the years leading up to his death in 1953, after being commissioned by the BBC to create a drama they could broadcast on the radio, which was still a relatively new mass medium. Dylan Thomas had Welsh poet and writer whose works include the poems "Do not go gentle into that good night" and "And death shall have no dominion"; and stories and radio broadcasts such as A Child's Christmas in Wales and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog. He became widely popular in his lifetime and remained so after his premature death at the age of 39 in New York City. By then he had acquired a reputation, which he had encouraged, as a "roistering, drunken and doomed poet".

The play was developed in the years before and after World War Two, and its impact casts a large enough shadow across literature for its time period. A Modernist reading of Under Milk Wood embraces an understanding of Thomas' need for earnest and intricate depictions of the truly fragmented nature of human experiences and life in general.

Thomas is reported to have commented that Under Milk Wood was developed in response to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, as a way of reasserting the evidence of beauty in the world. It is also thought that the play was a response by Thomas both to the Nazi concentration camps, and to the internment camps that had been created around Britain during World War II.

Values

This play celebrates life, humanity, and the inherent complexity of the human experience. It critiques and pokes fun at social stereotypes, including gender roles for men and women, religious piety and sexual freedoms and frustrations. 

As for his fellow humans, Thomas aimed to capture their beauty as well as their darkness, eccentricity, and even deviance, in order to perhaps reflect the complex moral hypocrisies in his audience.