Bob Kingdom was just a boy when he discovered the works of Dylan Thomas. Many years later, when he came to put together Dylan Thomas: Return Journey, Kingdom drew inspiration from his early experience to create a one-man show with the great Welsh poet and writer’s extraordinary voice front and centre.

“My first encounter wasn’t through the printed page but hearing that voice on the radio, and being amazed by its clarity, presence, and drama,” says Kingdom, reached at his London home. “He was reading ‘A Visit to America’. I asked my mother who it was and she said, ‘You’re not to listen to him, he’s an old boozer.’ So he became irresistible from then on.”

Kingdom presents a different image of Thomas to the popular legend of the self-destructive artist who ended his short life with an infamous binge at New York’s White Horse Tavern. “I’m fed up with the drinking aspect of it all,” he says. “Any fool can drink and fall over. We’re talking about a painstaking craftsman who made his poetry in the cold light of a Monday morning, not while standing at bars.”

The show is called Dylan Thomas: Return Journey not simply because it refers to one of Thomas’s radio plays but more significantly to mark his return, via Kingdom, to the stage. It uses as a frame one of Thomas’s lecture tours of North America in his last years.

“I’ve written bits myself, linking poems and prose works that he read to audiences. There’s a narrative going through it that talks of his own life. I’ll do ‘A Child’s Christmas in Wales’ because of the time of year, and ‘A Visit to America’, where he’s describing the situation which eventually killed him. I say: ‘Oh to die of American hospitality.’ And near the end I include a letter to his wife, Caitlin, about his next project, which he was really excited about—writing an opera with [Russian composer Igor] Stravinsky.”

Kingdom created the original piece some 30 years ago, and performed it first at the Chelsea Arts Club in London. “Then I got a wig made, and the right clothes, and the shoes that Dylan used to wear, and developed it further from things that people who knew Dylan told me over the years. I wrote these up in a way that he might have done. People ask, ‘What piece did you get that from?’ and I say that I can’t quite remember. Certainly, a lot of the intro is my own.”

In the 1930s Thomas moved to London from Swansea, his hometown, and spent a lot of time in Soho, which was then a bohemian neighbourhood, a connection that brought Kingdom’s work to the attention of another huge fan of the poet. “A friend of mine had a fish restaurant in Soho with a room upstairs that he turned into a little theatre. He had a week of one-man shows of people involved and associated with Soho. So I did mine and Anthony Hopkins came along, and loved it. He asked who the director was and I said, ‘There isn’t one.’ So then he said, ‘Let’s get together.’

“This was 25 years ago, and he hadn’t yet done Silence of the Lambs. Tony wrote on the side of my script about how I should feel coming on: ‘I am a genius, my brain is on fire, you’re about to see something remarkable.’ We kept it very simple. He used to come and see the show occasionally ‘to take out the improvements’, as he put it. Dylan wasn’t playing someone—he had to do these shows to make money. The less movement you do, the more people are aware of this gob—just this mouth, and this obsession with words. The moment you shuffle and move your feet you release too much energy. You stand there full-square, speaking. There’s something captivating about that.”

In late October, Kingdom was in Swansea to perform Dylan Thomas: Return Journey at the commemorations to mark the centenary of the man who’s unofficially become the national poet of Wales—an irony that the mischievous Thomas would have relished, since he didn’t speak or write Welsh. But the rich musicality of the language and the accent is strongly present in his words.

“I stayed at No. 5 Cwmdonkin Drive, where he was born,” says Kingdom. “There’s a tiny box room there that was his bedroom. Dylan wrote that you had to come out of it in order to turn around. That’s where he wrote many of his early poems, like ‘And Death Shall Have No Dominion’, when he was still living with his parents. I also took part in a Dylathon, 36 hours of nonstop reading from his work. It’s time to celebrate Dylan’s incredible artistry like that—not to make a hero of the drinking.”

Bob Kingdom’s Dylan Thomas: Return Journey runs from Tuesday (December 9) to December 21 at the Cultch’s Historic Theatre.