The main action in ‘Ugly Lovely Night’ takes place within the kitchen of a hall’s of residence block. The block is one of several identical ones on the seaside campus of Swansea University in South Wales . The halls are home to students from all over the world. Thin ones, Big ones, Black ones, Small ones, Brown ones, Lonely ones, Gay ones, Straight ones and some very, very disturbed ones.
Marlais Williams is a student at UTexas, Austin. His parents are ‘separated at the moment’ as Marlais puts it. He hasn’t seen his father since the day his parents rowed. The bust up disrupted Marlais’s life. He is obsessed with Dylan Thomas and Wales , a result of his dad’s own love of the poets work and some lost longing for the family’s Welsh roots.
Marlais’s mum has a new lover half her age and Marlais is bitter. He feels that he has been pushed out of his own home and wishes life were once again like it used to be - just Mum, Dad and him, living all together again. As part of a deeply thought out solution to his anguish, he organises an exchange to Swansea University . The city being the birth place of Dylan Thomas. Marlais has spent his first day wandering the streets of Dylan’s home town and now, as dusk falls, he prepares to make things right ...