"To what extent can 'Under Milk Wood' be considered a 'play for voices'?"
             When most people think of a play, they think of dressing up and going to the theatre; costumes; romance and comedy; ice cream at the interval and, of course, pantomimes.
             Dylan Thomas's 'Under Milk Wood', however, is none of these. Being, as it is, a radio play; the theatre is wherever the listener's radio is. The romance and comedy appears in the play but it fits into no fixed genre. The eating of ice cream is not fixed to the interval; the listener may eat it whenever s/he feels like it. The major difference is, however, the fact that the listener cannot see the actors and so this play must be made to be a play for voices.
             The first and foremost evidence of the fact that this is a play for voices is the fact that there are narrators to describe the setting and to tell us who is speaking but who do not tell the story. For example, at the start of the play the narrators set the scene for us:
             "It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible black, the cobblestreets silent and the hunched, courters'-and-rabbits' wood limping down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack fishingboat-bobbing sea."
             Already, without seeing this town, we have a good idea of what it looks like. The various words used to describe the different types of black help us to picture what each part of the town looks like. This first sentence helps us to picture the cobbled streets and the sea complete with fishing boats without ever having known anything about the town before. Along with what the characters say, the scene is set very well through out the play. In fact, in this play, the listener may well get a better picture of the scene than they would if it was on stage.
             Not only is the scene set well in this play, but because this is a play for voices, the scene can be c
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