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Do Not Go Gentle
BBC
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A sixty minute celebration of Dylan Thomas’s great poem.
It’s been called ‘the perfect poem’. You probably know someone who’s read it at a loved one’s funeral. And fifty years after it was written, it’s lost none of its power. It appears on over 600,000 web pages. So for this special celebration of the poem’s fiftieth anniversary, actor Keith Allen, rock legend John Cale and the poet’s daughter Aeronwy join readers on both sides of the Atlantic to explain why Dylan Thomas’s Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night says it all.
The poem was written in 1951, when Dylan Thomas realised that his father was dying of cancer. It’s an angry poem, refusing to accept the inevitability of loss. And yet its simplicity acts like a balm on the rawest of emotions. The film shows how it’s become so significant in the lives of millions of readers.
“My father died very young, and very quickly” says one young student at New York University’s prestigious Tisch School of Art, in the film. “I wish I could have said these words to him. It’s wonderful that Dylan Thomas had such positive things to say to his father.”
But the film reveals that Dylan’s relationship with his father was in fact complex and problematic. And within a year of his father’s passing, Dylan himself died in a New York hospital. Dylan’s daughter, Aeronwy, says that she believes her grandfather’s death took away much of Dylan’s motivation to go on writing.
Filmed in Wales and New York, this is a treat for the eye and the ear. It features Dylan’s own famous recording of the poem and John Cale’s musical setting, the voices of children from Swansea and emerging young actors from New York. The neon lights of Broadway and Greenwich Village, and the dancing sunlight on the estuary at Laugharne reflect the poem’s searing intensity of image.
Doctors fighting critical illness in Cardiff’s Heath Hospital; the NASA scientist who used the poem on a website to point up images of the splendour of a dying comet ; the mother for whom these words meant everything after the tragic death of her child – all of these bear witness to the poem’s universal, enduring power.
Director: John Geraint
Executive Producer: Phil George
