AND then there were seven… A1 Theatre Productions’ cast for Dylan Thomas’s “play for voices”, Under Milk Wood, has dropped from nine, requiring six actors to play 50 characters between them, while Chris Lakin takes on the role of First Voice and Second Voice, now bolted together as the Narrator.

Chris and fellow cast members Izaak Cainer and Anastasia Crook are taking the challenge in their stride ahead of the York company’s open-air performances against the backdrop of a willow tree in the Minster Residents Gardens.

“It’s a play that’s completely focused on the language,” says Chris, who will be further developing his acting skills when he takes up his place at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art in September.

“When Dylan Thomas was performing it with a company in America, they were understandably nervous, but he said, ‘Just love the words’, and that’s the best advice.”

Izaak, who will study at Mountview Academy of Theatre Arts from this autumn, offers his own advice on how to handle Thomas’s text.

“It’s a play for voices, so it’s a lot about letting the words paint the images for you,” he says.

“Captain Cat is blind, which is interesting to play – I once played Tommy, the pinball wizard, at York College and the blindness heightens your other senses, so if I ‘see’ the images in Thomas’s language, then hopefully the audience will too, and that’s easier to do because the language is so colourful.” “The play’s form gives you an opportunity to create the characters yourself,” says Anastasia. “There’s so much underlying meaning to what Thomas has written and you can take what you like from it.”

Thomas’s play captures the dreams – both waking and sleeping – of the inhabitants of Llareggub, a tiny fishing village in South Wales. Over 90 minutes of comedy, pathos, sadness and despair, it portrays a day in the life of such characters as the gentle Reverend Eli Jenkins, who visits the sick with jelly and poems, and Mr Pugh, a Dr Crippen lookalike who fantasises, in the steaming laboratory of his mind, about the destruction of his luckless wife.

As with his past productions of Thomas’s play, director John Cooper will kit out his cast in black – T-shirts all round, trousers for the boys, skirts for the girls – and each will have a chair arranged in an arc, with a performance space in the middle, a lectern for the Narrator and a rocking chair at the centre for Izaak’s Captain Cat.

Not only will Cooper’s company play myriad characters, but they must create live sound effects too, ranging from whistling kettles to purring cats. For Anastasia, it all adds up to a step up from past shows.

“I did The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe at Stagecoach – I was Lucy; Chris played Mr Beaver – and that was very different from this. I’ve never done anything like this before,” she says, as she prepares to do her GCSE studies in drama, art and music.

“A lot of it is down to the language being more grown up and performing with a smaller cast, when it’s about asking each other’s opinions about how we should do a scene, rather than one person leading it.”

“We’re trusting each other’s creativity. John triggers that and then trusts you to fill in the gaps,” says Izaak.

“That’s one of the things that John’s so good at, having the confidence in us being free to try things out,” says Chris. “It’s something that I’ve really gained from working with him for the past few years.”

One further task has been to master Welsh accents, and the company members have done so without recourse to a voice coach. “Playing so many characters, you don’t just find one accent – and it’s definitely not like Gavin And Stacey, which everyone thinks of immediately, but that’s slang Welsh,” says Anastasia.

• A1 Theatre Productions present Under Milk Wood in Minster Residents Gardens, York, from Wednesday to Saturday at 7.30pm. If wet, performances will take place at 41 Monkgate. Tickets: £8, concessions £6, on 0844 939 0015.