On Dylan Thomas's 100th birthday, Jasper Rees visits the exciting celebrations all over Britain, including a reading by Sir Ian McKellen The day has dawned at last. A year-long celebration of Dylan Thomas’s 100th birthday has reached its crescendo – in London, in New York where Michael Sheen led a reading of Under Milk Wood in the same venue where it was first performed in 1953, and above all in Swansea, the ugly lovely town of the poet’s birth. Indeed, if you’re reading this before 11pm, the celebration is still going on. Yesterday morning in Swansea’s Grand Theatre saw the start of the Dylathon: 36 hours of readings from Thomas’s writings. Jo Brand began at the beginning with the opening of Under Milk Wood. The vast cast list includes Sir Ian McKellen and Big Issue sellers, Nicholas Parsons and rugby legend JPR Williams. It will finish at the very minute of his birth. I was in Swansea for the kick-off of the Do Not Go Gentle festival, now in its third noisy year in the Uplands, the suburb where the poet was born. In the immaculately restored 5 Cwmdonkin Drive, Cardiff musician Kirk Morgan set “Do not go gentle into that good night” to haunting music in the front room below where the poet was conceived and born. I qualified for inclusion on the festival bill via a tenuous link: my grandfather was Dylan’s dentist in Carmarthen. In a wider sense, the Anglo-Welsh faultline – that hyphenated identity – is a rich Dylanesque seam for anyone who lives in one place and writes about the other. The centenary’s presiding magus has been Jeff Towns, an East Ender who moved to Swansea in 1970. An antiquarian bookseller and one-man Dylan Thomas encyclopaedia, wherever #DT100 has been celebrated, he has been there. But even he couldn’t be in three places this weekend, and chose to take part in the Dylathon. After a night listening to raucous punk poetry and steamy R&B;, I boarded the slow train to London, the route so often followed by Thomas, for the Dylan Thomas in Fitzrovia festival. The brainwave of Griff Rhys Jones, this included big splashy events – a Southbank concert with star readings, a screening of A Poet in New York, a tumultuous semi-staging of Theatr Clwyd’s Under Milk Wood. There were also walking tours taking in Thomas’s travelling shed, and a delightful short film of interviews with people (mostly women) who knew and fondly remembered the poet. Two new examinations of Thomas’s marriage deserve a longer life. In the Wheatsheaf, where Dylan first met his wife Caitlin, dance company Thick and Tight performed an intimate suite set to words and music. A Warring Absence, a verbatim play by Tim Schneider, toured the battleground through his letters and her memoir. Daniel Evans declaimed Dylan’s hollow I love yous and an exquisitely wry Sian Thomas gave the impression that Caitlin was put on this earth to chop the poet off at the knees. I asked Trefor Ellis, who was married to the Thomases’ daughter Aeronwy, if he recognised his mother-in-law. He nodded cherubically. I got to chair a couple of events – with biographer Andrew Lycett and academic John Goodby, and the poets Gillian Clarke and Owen Sheers. The consensus among them was that the centenary had thankfully managed to privilege the work over the shabbier elements of the life, and that his sometimes contested Welshness is now beyond dispute. The year has certainly been a valuable exercise in branding for Welsh culture. Literature Wales’s project to promote Thomas in schools has made much play on the Welsh word for “influence”, which happens to contain the poet's name: dylanwad. No one seems to have noticed another pun – that Dylan equals wad for Wales’s coffers. Swansea certainly needs the cash. Having dropped the ball for most of the year, Swansea City Council has got in on the act at the twelfth hour: the Lottery-funded refurbishment of the Dylan Thomas Centre opens this week. And so to tonight, when the centenary ends at the ending. Among the readers at the 36-hour Dylathon will be Siân Phillips, who as a schoolgirl in the late 1940s read with Thomas on the radio. “He was so polite,” she told me. “I had never been treated with such deference by an artist.” The deference is now all for Dylan Thomas. It only remains to wish the poet a happy birthday. Or, as Dylan Thomas’s Auntie Annie would have said on his visits to the farm on Fern Hill where only Welsh was spoken, penblwydd hapus.

• published: 28 Oct 2014
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