Under Milk Wood: An Illustrated Retelling

Adapted by Cerys Matthews and illustrated by Kate Evans, this is Under Milk Wood as a perfect bedtime story for children, introducing Dylan Thomas' characters and unforgettable dialogue to the next generation.

GABI'S REVIEW

I picked up Cerys Matthews’ children’s illustrated adaptation of Under Milk Wood with a sense of heightened curiosity, wondering how its author would adapt this complex work while retaining its integral themes. The book itself is simply breathtaking as an object. The beautiful illustrations by Kate Evans use gold foil to shine as lights on boats and in houses, and the town and inhabitants are wonderfully evoked. While the original Under Milk Wood, by Dylan Thomas, is for me both a lullaby and a scream, Cerys Matthews’ adaptation leans into the lullaby while skilfully preserving Thomas’s linguistic energy and flair.

The implications of what is not said in this play for voices is used to transform existential undercurrent for adults into a world of safety, wonder, and imaginative play for kids. While Dylan Thomas’s original is often studied for its darker elements of lust and mortality, Matthews re-centres the work as a marvellous bedtime story: a gentle gaze over a sleeping town inviting the young reader into the dreams of the inhabitants rather than viewing the ghosts that haunt them.

Matthews appears to understand that children are naturally attuned to the hush, in that their imaginations come alive in the gaps between what adults say and do. She preserves Thomas’s irregular rhythms, ensuring the ear still waits for that next beat. By keeping snippets of the half-spoken and staccato dialogue like "[p]igs can't read, my dear," she retains a sense of meaning as something to puzzle over.

The silence isn’t empty, it’s loaded. Staying true to the original, Matthews distils the unspoken into a series of vivid, dream-like vignettes. For a child, the choir in the kitchen or the whisper in the loft isn't eerie; it’s magical. It creates the sense of a world where everything has a secret life. In the original, the town is ghosted by the almost said and almost done; in a child’s context, this “almost” is the essence of play.

Captain Cat’s listening to his haunted silence has been re-framed as an old sailor dreaming of his heroic voyages and lost friends. Mrs Dai Bread’s connection between the rising bread and a lasting marriage is presented as a simple, profound truth about caring. For a child, the lesson is clear: we invest our belief in things (like the focus on a rising loaf) to make them real. It is about the importance of the warmth of a kitchen and the comfort of home.

The Reverend Eli Jenkins, Thomas’s metaphoric lighthouse of lungs sermonising to the gulls and the empty sky to keep the world from sliding off the map, is now presented as a literal ritual Good Morning Town, Good Night Town, reinforcing the book’s structure as a circular day-to-night story. Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard’s choreography of the dead becomes a colourful characterisation. In the children’s version, her obsessive cleaning is represented as a funny rhythmic quirk, and her ghost husbands appear more like friendly bumbling imaginary friends acquiescing to her bossiness and rules.

Cerys Matthews has taken the god’s-eye view and turned it into a parent’s-eye view without sacrificing any of the resonance of the original. She tucks the town of Llareggub (Buggerall) back into bed at the end of the day, showing that the things never said out loud are often the ones that comfort us most. We exist not because the tide answers, but because we keep throwing the rope. For this reader, Matthews’ book is the rope thrown to the next generation, ensuring that the hush of Llareggub is never truly silent.

Under Milk Wood: An Illustrated Retelling is available to order in store.

PUBLISHER REVIEW

Adapted by Cerys Matthews and illustrated by Kate Evans, this is Under Milk Wood as a perfect bedtime story for children, introducing Dylan Thomas' characters and unforgettable dialogue to the next generation.

Under Milk Wood shows a day in the life of a small seaside town called Llareggub.

We meet the inhabitants while still asleep, having wild dreams.

We follow them as they wake up and go about their business: in the school yard, on a boat bobbing on the bay, in a field full of nannygoats.

And, as dusk and darkness fall at the end of the day, we say 'Goodnight', tucking them back into bed, to sleep once more.