On the Dylan Thomas Trail by David Atkinson

Thursday night in Swansea and it’s a full house for curtain up. Outside it’s the kind of night that the poet Dylan Thomas would doubtless 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 theatre, where Thomas himself trod the boards during the early 1930s.

Every autumn the festival, which runs from October 27 to November 9, his birthday and the day he died respectively, celebrates the gritty, wild-boy poetry of Wales’ most famous errant genius. Events focus on Swansea, where Thomas was born in 1914, and a place he once famously described as an “ugly lovely town”. But the recent festival boasted an added dimension: a frisson of Hollywood glamour. The Edge of Love, a new £5m Britflick staring top UK talent Keira Knightley, Sienna Miller and Matthew Rhys, had been shooting recently at locations around South Wales. The film, due out spring 2008, focuses on the poet's tempestuous private life and evokes the scenery that inspired his work.

Before curtain up on the play, I pop into The Queen’s Hotel for a quick half of Theakston’s Old Peculier and a chance to soak up the atmosphere of one of the few remaining traditional Swansea pubs, where Thomas would indulge his legendary passion for imbibing. On a wintry Thursday night it’s warming and animated, the kind of place where Thomas would have felt right at home. In the corner a giant beer stands, claws raised, with just a strategically draped Welsh flag to protect his modesty. A sign on the wall reads: “Wanted. Non-smoking alcoholics.”

Earlier that day Aeronwy Thomas, Dylan’s surviving daughter, had taken me on a whistle-stop tour of the Dylan Thomas Centre with its permanent exhibition, Dylan Thomas – Man and Myth, which traces the story of the poet’s life from a Swansea terrace house to his final days in New York. Aside from the collection of memorabilia, such as his ink-stained suit, what really brings his work to life for me is a series of readings on CD, including the booming baritone of Richard Burton reading Under Milk Wood and Thomas himself reading Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night, the celebrated paean to his dying father.

“I’ve seen rushes of the film and they’ve glammed it up quite a bit to what I remember,” Aeronwy tells me over bowls of vegetable soup in Dylan’s Books ‘n’ Bites cafe, black-and-white pictures of her father as a young man surrounding us. “Of course it’s an interpretation, but if it encourages people to read the books, and gets Dylan’s work back on the school curriculum, then I’ll be happy,” says Aeronwy, who was ten when Thomas died.

Success came late for Thomas with critical plaudits constantly overshadowed by constant money worries and reports of his legendary drunkenness, although the latter may well be due more to undiagnosed diabetes than, in fact, rampant alcoholism. But, after his death, he became a true cult figure, earning an inclusion on the cover of The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band at the express behest of John Lennon and inspiring the lyrics of a certain Bob Dylan.

“Thomas is an artists’ artist. All the painters and photographers of his age wanted to capture his image,” says festival organiser David Woolley, looking stressed between ferrying performers to and from Swansea’s train station. “Thomas fell out of favour for a couple of decades but there’s now a whole new generation of writers, especially young Welsh poets such as Owen Shears, who are embracing his legacy and adapting it for their own voice,” he adds.

The next day, I pick up the Thomas trail again and head for Laugharne, a cluster of stone-built cottages, located eight miles from Carmarthen along winding, country lanes. Built around The Grist, a makeshift town square with an ancient cross and with views of Laugharne’s 12th-century castle overlooking the estuary, the town is alleged to have inspired Llareggub, the small Welsh town in which Under Milk Wood is set. The name is "bugger all" spelt backwards, but appeared in print as Llaregyb so as not to offend delicate post-war sensibilities.

Thomas first came to Laugharne in May 1938 and returned frequently thereafter, writing of the town: “... in this timeless, mild, beguiling island of a town ... here we are, and there is nowhere like it anywhere at all.”

Along the side of the currently closed Browns Hotel, where Thomas’ bar tab matched the magnitude of his creative genius, a narrow country lane leads past the bakery to the ultimate place of pilgrimage for Thomas devotees: the boathouse. This is where Thomas spent the final and most productive years of his life, living with his wife Caitlin Macnamara and their three children from 1949 to 1953.

As I edge along the moss-carpeted path, a cluster of steep, stone steps descending dramatically to the beach below, I first reach the garage, which Thomas used as his writing shed. It was here, with views across the estuary to Carmarthen Bay, that Thomas indulged in his “craft or sullen art”, penning Under Milk Wood and some of his best-loved poetry.

The boathouse itself is rather underwhelming with lifeless exhibits and a stale mock-up of the family’s erstwhile front parlour. Upstairs a group of tourists is watching a looped video while shifting impatiently on plastic, folding chairs. The garage, by contrast, feels far more evocative of the man behind the myth with its discarded, scrunched-up papers and pools of fountain pen ink as if he had just popped out for a quick breath of fresh, sea air.

Back in town I ask ruddy-faced George Tremlett, owner of Corran Books, with its weather-beaten façade and labyrinthine collection of old, dust-covered books, why tributes to Thomas in Laugharne are so understated. “Laugharne accepts its Dylan Thomas heritage but doesn’t dwell on it. But, believe me,” he smiles, shuffling his black-velour carpet slippers on the dusty carpet, “The locals have sold the dartboard at Browns Hotel to Americans many times over.”

“Thomas liked the simple pub life and hid his genius – that’s the fascination for me,” says George, who has lived in Laugharne since 1982 and wrote the autobiography of Thomas’ widow, entitled Caitlin (Secker & Warburg, 1986). “He evokes something in me – even at my age he makes me cry. Thomas never tried to be contemporaneous. He wrote about the great answerable questions in life and that’s why his work has become part of national heritage,” he adds.

Dylan Thomas collapsed and died in New York in November 1953 aged 39. He was on a lecture tour of America, had been mixing with the Beat poets, and Under Milk Wood had been performed for the first time earlier that year, also in New York, to huge critical acclaim.

Both Dylan and Caitlin are buried in the graveyard of St Martin’s Church in Laugharne, the latter joining her late husband in the flower-strewn plot in 1994. The graves are marked with a simple white cross keeping watch over Laugharne and looking out across the rolling hills of Carmarthenshire. In the cold-stone interior of the church itself, a plague to Thomas bears the inscription from one of his most evocative poems, Ferne Hill. It reads: “Time held me green and dying. Though I sang in my chains like the sea.”

But I couldn’t bid my farewells to Thomas without raising one last glass to toast the literary legacy of one of the 20th century’s greatest writers. Sadly Browns Hotel, Thomas’ favourite pub in Laugharne, has been closed for over a year now with the Grade II listed building mooted to reopen in 2008 following a £1.2m refurbishment. So instead I head next door to the New Three Mariners, take my pint of Bishops’ Revenge and sit in the snug on a battered leather sofa with a copy of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog, which Aeronwy had given to me the previous day in Swansea.

There seems no more fitting way to finish the trail than sitting in a Laugharne pub on a winter’s evening and letting his words from the story Old Grabo wash over me as I sip my pint: “I liked the taste of beer, its live, white lather, its brass-bright deeps, the sudden world through the wet brown walls of the glass, the tilted rush to the lips and the slow swallowing down to the lapping belly,” he wrote.

And I, for one, couldn’t agree more.