A Child's Christmas in Wales: Best Xmas on DVD
Family Christmas Movie: Watch DylanThomas' Welsh Carols on Xmas Day
Dec 9, 2008
Forget the usual fare of movies, one of the best videos of all time to have in your cargo hold for Christmas is the TV 1987 production of A Child’s Christmas in Wales.
There have been several dramatizations of this magical poem by Dylan Thomas but the one to keep near the TV during the Christmas season stars Denholm Elliott and screenplay by Peter Kreutzer, directed by Dan McBrearty and winner of a Gemini award that year for best direction.
Times of Old, Times Nearly Here
The scene moves back in time from a present day Christmas in a Welsh living room to the long ago and far away remembrances of the author's boyhood Christmas at a seaside village in Wales. Filled with vignettes from the poem such as the fire at the home of Mr.and Mrs.Prothero and festive Christmas day unwrapping, eating, and caroling replete with all the aunts and uncles.
Famous Lines from the Poem:
I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six.
Other Favorite Scenes Include:
- Snowballing the cats in Mrs. Prothero's garden
- Putting out the Fire in the Prothero living room
- Hale and hearty men marching down to the sea
- Receiving the gigantic snow globe watching the young Thomas carry upstairs to his bedroom
- Christmas afternoon with aunts and uncles: one auntie sits the whoopee cushion the uncle had mischievously set down
- Playing toy soldiers
- Auntie Hanna singing her throat out with her fifth glass of Madeira wine.
The greatest of all is the voice of Denholm Elliott in his sonorous recounting of the story. Elliott’s deep baritone with its Welsh brogue must be the closest there is to the actual voice of Dylan Thomas which still exists on several recordings.
History of Child's Christmas Productions:
- 1945 poem first published by Harper’s Bazaar in 1945.
- 1952 recorded by Dylan Thomas himself for Caedmon records
- 1982 adapted to stage by Adrian Mitchell and Jeremy Brooks of the Royal Shakespeare Company
- 1987 TV adaptation for BBC, screenplay Peter Kreutzer, directed Dan McBreaty: Gemini award
- 2000 Phil Sneed's adaptation for stage by The Foothill Theater Company in Nevada City, CA
- 2008 new adaptation at Irish Repertory Theater in New York running 12/3-1/4
Bio Notes for Dylan Thomas (1914—1953)
- Born in the seaport town of Swansea, West Glamorgan in Wales
- Father school teacher, mother a would-be-poet, Celtic heritage
- Settled in London, wrote poetry, prose, recorded for the BBC
- First poems published made him famous in 1930'3, supported family writing for BBC
- Made three major reading tours of the U.S. mainly reading at college campuses
- Known and loved for his readings in which he half recited, half sang lines known as "Welsh singing"
- A Child's Christmas in Wales was published posthumously in 1955 after untimely death at age 39.
Three Beloved Poems Include:
- Fern Hill
- Do not go gentle into that good night
- The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Dylan Thomas for the Record
Known to be a heavy drinker, his life style was criticized but the discipline and devotion he brought to his work makes him one of the most important poets of modern poetry.
Thomas said his poetry was “the record of my individual struggle from darkness towards some measure of light…To be stripped of darkness is to be clean, to strip of darkness is to make clean.”
His poems he said were “written for the love of man and in praise of God.”
 |
 |
