Original direction by Anthony Hopkins. Presented by Richard Jordan Productions. At the Cultch’s Historic Theatre on Thursday, December 11. Continues until December 21

Poet Dylan Thomas did for words what painter Mark Rothko did for colour: he found in their pure, sensual pleasure depths of joy and longing. Listening to solo actor Bob Kingdom deliver Thomas’s words is sometimes a nearly ecstatic experience.

Check this out, from “A Child’s Christmas in Wales”: “Years and years ago, when I was a boy, when there were wolves in Wales, and birds the color of red-flannel petticoats whisked past the harp-shaped hills…” Mercy: the imagery, the internal rhymes, the delight in the sound of the human voice.

Kingdom presents Dylan Thomas: Return Journey as if the writer were delivering a lecture, and in an interview with the Straight, the performer acknowledged that he’s written bits himself to link the poems, letters, and so on. The result is engagingly seamless—and most of the evening is pure, delicious Thomas.

A surprising amount of the material is funny. Sometimes, the wit comes in quick bursts: “My mother was as proud as a crisp doily.” And sometimes it flows through sustained passages, as in the poet’s self-description: “The face of an excommunicated cherub, a nose that’s polished every day, a body, when clothed, once so cruelly described as looking like an unmade bed…a staggering swagger that’s spoiling for a fight with any pavement bold enough to take me on, and a fancy, pulpit-posh voice with brass knobs on, speaking three languages: English, BBC Third Programme and Saloon.”

Wisely, Kingdom juxtaposes lighter storytelling with passages that are darker and more dense, including “And death shall have no dominion” and “Do not go gentle into that good night.” A poem such as “Lament” is complex: “When I was a windy boy and a bit/And the black spit of the chapel fold/(Sighed the old ram rod dying of women),/I tiptoed shy in the gooseberry wood…,” but if you just let yourself fall into it, it will catch you with its images and repetitions.

Kingdom delivers Thomas’s writing with simplicity and intelligence. As directed by no less than Anthony Hopkins, he stands, or sits, and speaks. But his voice is musical, he clearly loves the material, and he knows what he’s talking about.

In constructing this evening, Kingdom has concentrated on Thomas’s skill rather than his notorious alcoholism. You can hear both the innocence and the ache in “Poem in October”, which describes the changing of the seasons: “And I saw in the turning so clearly a child’s/Forgotten mornings when he walked with his mother/Through the parables/Of sunlight/And the legends of the green chapels.”

Our culture is debasing language at an alarming rate. Refresh your relationship with speech through Dylan Thomas: Return Journey.