SWANSEA, Wales — Thursday night in Swansea and it's a full house. Outside, it's the kind of night that Dylan Thomas would have described as "starless and Bible black." Inside, text-messaging teenagers and polite pensioners count the seconds to the interval and the ritual stampede for ice-cream as the Swansea Little Theatre Company trots through another performance of Thomas' signature work, "Under Milk Wood." They stage the play here each year for the annual Dylan Thomas Festival and pack out the tiny waterfront theater — Thomas himself trod the boards for the company in the early 1930s.
Every autumn the festival, which runs from Oct. 27 to Nov. 9, his birthday and the day he died respectively, celebrates the gritty, wild-boy poetry of Wales' most famous errant genius. The focus is Swansea, where Thomas was born in 1914 and a place he famously described as an "ugly lovely town."
But last year's festival had an added dimension: a frisson of Hollywood glamour. "The Edge of Love," a $10-million movie starring Keira Knightley, Sienna Miller and Matthew Rhys, had been shooting at locations around South Wales. The film, which opened in the United Kingdom last week, focuses on the poet's tempestuous private life, with the scenery that inspired his work as a backdrop.