A caroling session sprinkled with occasional reminiscences, Irish Repertory Theater’s “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” adapts theDylan Thomas prose poem into a play with plenty of hymns.
Five actors, clad in red and green, and an accompanist are crammed onto a cozy stage with presents, wreaths, a roaring hearth and a half-dozen Christmas trees. (How they found room for the piano is anyone’s guess.) Chief among the players, attired in a grandfatherly cardigan, is John Cullum, who holds an oversized book in his lap and occasionally seems to be checking his place. No matter. This sweet and modest show conjures plenty of good will toward men, Mr. Cullum very much included.
Thomas’s work is a cavalcade of imagery and sensation — the snowy sights, smells and sounds that marked the Christmases of his boyhood. “All the Christmases roll down the hill towards the Welsh-speaking sea, like a snowball whiter and bigger and rounder, like a cold and headlong moon bundling down the sky that was our street,” Mr. Cullum recites. The actors take the prose parts in turn, though Ashley Robinson (a sweetly likable actor, though overly fond of hair gel) most often plays Thomas as a boy. This is a change from last year’s “A Christmas Memory,”in which Mr. Robinson played the adult version of the narrator of that Truman Capote story.
The descriptions of treats and toys are evocative, the carols appealingly sung, the cast charming. No one attempts the Welsh accent with which Thomas read his own work, but two of the songs are sung in Welsh: a version of “Silent Night” and the hymn “Calon Lân.” A few of the tunes are by the show’s director, Charlotte Moore, who adapted Thomas’s poem for the stage. Her tone is occasionally a little treacly, but then again, so is Christmas. Figgy pudding for all!
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