They give us the money shot early. Caitlin curled around Dylan’s head like a Welsh blanket. Is she suffocating him or shielding him from something? From himself perhaps, or more likely, from her. For while Dylan Thomas was a notorious boozer and womaniser, it is Caitlin’s wilder and less predictable spirit that we are here to witness.
Set in a circle of folding chairs, we are addressed as if at an AA meeting (Caitlin joined AA twenty years after Dylan’s death.) We hear snippets of their life together, how they met before he became a great writer, her ambition to be a dancer: ‘It was to be a truce, my body and his brains.’ Then the babies, how she followed him to London, to America. It’s not a direct narrative but more like remembered episodes, filtered through the lens of a hangover. Each nugget of biographical information is exploded physically in a fierce and passionate duet with chairs. As Caitlin, Eddie Ladd is fully convincing, raw, dynamic, and scary. Gwyn Emberton gives Dylan a sinuous quality. Words wriggle out of him like demons, as if his poetry is a curse. He later eats his words. He is not a happy soul.
This battle of wills crashes and burns around the space, chairs are flung and bruises shown like prizes. They pick up and knock down, pull and punch, roll and lift. The message comes through loud and clear – they are a dysfunctional couple and they are equals. The love between them struggles to rise above the lack of trust.
As the piece progresses there is little choreographic development and it becomes a relentless game of what one can do with a chair. There are brilliant moments – the pair yoked together through a chair, Dylan eating sweets off a tray – and the performances are exquisite. While this is the woman’s story – hurray – it felt to me that it would have been helpful to know more about their relationship. Caitlin asks the audience for money, but what if we don’t know that Dylan never sent her any? What about Dylan’s illnesses and their effect on her? Some further context would have enriched the piece. The final all-out battle to a demonstrative sound score by Thipaulsandra lacked impact because of all that had come before.
At twenty minutes this would be fantastically exciting dance. But Caitlin, rather like the woman herself, didn’t know when to stop.