To begin at the end. In the graveyard at Laugharne the bright white cross marking the grave of Dylan Thomas has been heaped with liquorice allsorts (the poet liked them) and with money (he needed it). On the slope of a hill across the valley another huddle of gravestones has sprung up. It will not be there for long and there are no bodies in it. It's a ghost or a reflection. It reimagines the solid thing, as Thomas reimagined Laugharne when he dreamed up the yearning, rapscallion, back-to-front town of Llareggub for Under Milk Wood.
Last weekend, to mark the centenary of Thomas's birth, the National Theatre Wales joined forces with BBC Cymru Wales to take audiences on a journey through Laugharne, a mixture of former and current scenes, actual and imagined presences. Raw Material features the Laugharne Players – who have put on Under Milk Wood every year since 1958 – and, as intermittent guides, two professional actors, Charles Dale and Russell Gomer. Dale is a tippling romantic, at one point spotted glugging on the lawn of one of Thomas's houses. Gomer is a bulging-eyed, long-bearded shaman known as Mike Voyce, who leaves messages pinned to trees and can be heard spouting from loudspeakers. Billed as crewyr (creators) are the visual artist Marc Rees, who set up that boneless graveyard, and the writer Jon Tregenna.
Tregenna is also the manager of Brown's, the inviting bar in which Thomas did much of his drinking, and which was one of the first stops for most of the promenading audience. Here, under a sign advising against filming and photography, a film shows Rhys Ifans being Dylan in the White Horse Tavern in Greenwich Village. It was there that the poet claimed to have downed 18 whiskies (revisionists say more likely four) before his final collapse. Across the road from Brown's, in the cellar of the house where Thomas's father lived, sits the mayor of the town, tucked into yet another bar – this one shaped like a ship's prow – and got up as Captain Cat, the all-seeing blind fantasist in Thomas's play. If you pick a bottle with a number on it, he'll spin you a Laugharne yaugharne. Mine (bottle 13) featured a fish-and-chip man who used to gob into the fat to see if it was hot enough for frying.
The shout-out for Thomas this year – with dramatisations on telly and a touring Clwyd Theatr Cymru production of Under Milk Wood – is just. His celebrity as a swiller of drink has for too long muddied proper recognition of the "sullen art" that made, among some bilge, a number of luminous poems, rich short stories and the garrulous splendour of his play for voices. Anti-Welshness – the last widely acceptable racial prejudice in Britain – has not helped: "windy" and "Welsh" slip out of people's mouths as if they were conjoined twins. Raw Material is a real attempt to combine celebration of his life and the influence of his work.
When NTW produced The Passion, they magnificently fused past and present and made Port Talbot look like Calvary. Raw Material is not the same site-specific triumph. Fact and fiction come together unevenly. As you wind your way from top to bottom of the small town, noting how short a distance it was that kept asunder the hot-water-bottled body of Myfanwy Price and Mog Edwards, "a draper mad with love" – actors and bystanders, Laugharneys and the audience become indistinguishable. Nevertheless, as drama this is, in the words of Llareggub's Reverend Eli Jenkins, often "touch-and-go".
This must be one of the few theatrical experiences to credit among its creative team an owl-keeper, a ninja knitter and a taxidermist. The first provides one of the most breath-taking moments of the day; the second some of the jolliest. The third was apparently one of the inspirations for the character of Voyce (the other was a local smuggler who kept a black canoe for his night work). He has provided some good specimens but a dangerous example.
There is always a danger that site-specific work will become a series of stuffed tableaux, a pageant rather than a play. Raw Material does not avoid that danger. It does not have urgency as a piece of storytelling, but is a stately progress from one installation to the next. Most are intriguing, some are whimsical. A few of the most striking have only a faint relevance to the Rimbaud of Cwmdonkin Drive. Outside one house a young woman sits in a yard, a pram beside her, playing her fine, rescored version of Polly Garter's love lament. Inside, a beautiful lace tablecloth is spread out: it is made of salt. Down by the beige sweep of the estuary, where the cockle trade once flourished, is a boatshed that belonged to Richard – High Wind in Jamaica – Hughes. Inside it, winds flap the sail of a boat and music is playing. Shelter from the Storm is being wheezed by Thomas's namesake, the former Robert Zimmerman.
The solo portraits of Under Milk Wood make a bawdy jostle and a melancholy stream. Pulled together by music and narration, they suggest a continuous murmur of the unconscious. Raw Material would be a fuller response to Thomas if it had more smut and, particularly, more sounds. Theatre still has something to learn from radio drama.
