Under Milk Wood (15) Three stars

With: Rhys Ifans, Charlotte Church, Gareth Edwards. Dir: Kevin Allen

Runtime: 87 minutes

ON going to the cinema this weekend, you may notice a dearth of new releases, unusual in these days of 18-screen multiplexes ever hungry for fresh fare. Do not be alarmed. Cinema has not been put on the ration. Rather, it is the Bond effect.

Unwilling to take on the behemoth that is the new 007 film Spectre (released on Monday and given a four star review in The Herald last week after its first press screening), the major studios have left the field clear for the small but plucky arthouse films, of which it would be hard to find one pluckier than Kevin Allen’s take on Under Milk Wood.

To date, the best known film version of Dylan Thomas’s “play for voices” is the 1972 picture starring Richard Burton, narrator and “stranger”, Peter O’Toole as Captain Cat, the blind sea dog, and Elizabeth Taylor as Rosie Probert, “worshipped and adored”. Here, the plum parts are taken by Rhys Ifans as Captain Cat, and Charlotte Church, voice of an angel/anti-austerity campaigner, as Polly Garter, who loves babies and is rather fond, too, of the act of making them.

Thomas’s poem charts one day in the life of Llareggub, a Welsh fishing village in which there appears to be bugger all going on (the name of the town, read backwards, is one of Thomas’s many sly jokes). We arrive in the dead of a moonlit night as the town snores. “To begin at the beginning,” purrs Ifans, our narrator, and we’re off to the races. More precisely, we’re off on an 87-minute cross between The Singing Detective and the worst cheese dream you ever had.

Cinema has enjoyed a few turns around the floor with Thomas lately, notably in the films The Edge of Love and Set Fire to the Stars, in both of which he was depicted in familiar terms as the perennially sozzled poet and tortured soul. His image having skirted perilously close to caricature at times, it is easy to forget the brilliance of his work, exemplified by the verbal pyrotechnics that is Under Milk Wood.

Ifans, a co-producer on the film, does a fine job as keeper of the Thomas lines, but he has a killer of an act to follow in Burton, who spoke the words as if he was divulging the very secret of life itself. Burton’s tones, smooth as mole fur, sent the listener into the kind of reverie required for Under Milk Wood to be successful. Ifans’ delivery is more natural and spirited, but less hypnotic.

Allen stays faithful to the text, but otherwise everything else is up for grabs. Sometimes the surreality pays off wonderfully; more often than not it falls flat. Overall, the relentlessly vulgar tone is an acquired taste, and that is before a couple of characters start doing unspeakable things with meatballs (don’t ask). While the 1972 version had a slight Carry On in the Valleys naughtiness about it, Allen’s picture goes for full on bawdiness, often to fairly startling effect.

Where Allen does well is in picking out and celebrating the sly, catty humour of the piece. All the great Thomas characters are here, from Organ Morgan the organist to Willy Nilly the spectacularly nosey postie. One particularly tips a Welsh hat to Charlotte Church, who plays Polly Garter like the Cadbury’s Caramel Bunny, all heaving bosom, fluttering eyelashes and promises of fun. And yes, she does indeed get to sing (a fairly filthy song as it turns out).

Another Brownie point for Allen’s picture comes from the fact that it is spectacularly, unapologetically Welsh. In the 1972 version, the accents wandered all over the shop (David Jason, later Del Boy himself, was to be found playing Nogood Boyo, for example). Here, the accents are so fruitily authentic the cast make Plaid Cymru leader Leanne Wood sound like Joyce Grenfell.

All involved deserved credit for trying something a little different with Thomas’s work. Even if their efforts turn out to be more am-dram than awesome, their Welsh hearts are in the right place.