“Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,

Time held me green and dying

Though I sang in my chains like the sea.”

Thus ends Tom Hollander’s first recital as the poet Dylan Thomas in BBC Two’s recent drama, A Poet in New York. What follows is a whirlwind of vicious realism, nostalgic flashbacks and moments of real beauty. In feeling, it’s easy to imagine that this dramatisation has captured something of what the poet experienced during the last few weeks of his life in New York. 

Hollander’s performance is impressive: he perfects the difficult balancing act of a man who was at once deeply flawed and at the same time blessed with what many consider to be true poetic genius, whatever that might mean. The drama is not for the fainthearted: it does not flinch from Thomas’s alcoholism or his illness, and the troubled though loving relationship he shared with his wife, Caitlin. The affair is one of vitriol and domestic violence as often as it is poetry and dances on the beach. Essie Davis’s performance as Thomas’s wife is charged, and though it’s possible to see why he loved her, both Hollander and Davis manage what the Telegraph’s Ceri Radford calls "the perfect antithesis to the woefully glamourised […] 2008 film The Edge of Love." The remaining characters of note: Liz Reitell, played by Phoebe Fox and Ewen Bremner’s John Malcolm Brinnin, were executed well as Thomas’s long-suffering American companions. This said, in playing the parts of protesting nurses standing witness to the poet’s downward spiral, neither Fox nor Bremner have quite the energy of their fellow cast members. 

The piece is not without its flaws. Brilliant acting and masterful screenplay is juxtaposed with clumsy transitions and occasionally, cheap special effects: a personal favourite has to be a 90s-esque moment when Thomas’s ghost gets up from his body, and fades to colour whilst strings wail in the background. The programme is heavy on flashbacks, and although this works well sometimes, at others it seems unnecessary, and possesses all the subtlety of a sledgehammer.

This being said, the literature lifts the entire production into the dizzy orbit of the poet’s brilliance. Despite his sordid, unhappy affair with Reitell, despite vomit and asthma and the 18 straight whiskies that kill him, when he’s on stage there is no more lyrical charm than Thomas’s poetry. Rough and full and rich and honest, it is easy to get lost amidst beautiful shots of waist-high summer grass and the sea by Laugharne. In the end, the drama achieves what seems to have been its intention, which is not so much a panegyric as an unflinching elegy on the failings of Thomas’s character and the tragedies of his life. Instead, it frames the legacy that has secured him amidst the constellations of artistic geniuses with whom he now keeps company in death.

A Poet in New York was first broadcast on BBC One Wales, 30 April 2014.