Hell, there's even a faint glow of pride at the notion that the Tory party is on the point of having its first Welsh leader: Gorseinon's Michael Howard.In the mid-Seventies, Dylan Thomas started to come into slightly better focus. Dylan Thomas showed up somewhere in the upper middle ranks alongside the opera singer Sir Geraint Evans and the Amen Corner - and only a step or two up from the world bowls champion Mal Evans and Crossroads regular Stan Stennett.As with all figures of national pride, the relationship was more theoretical than anything else. In school "Do Not Go Gentle..." was occasionally read out at assembly, but Thomas's poems seldom featured in Eng Lit. As a teenager, I remember reading that Bob Dylan had named himself after the poet and being pleased but a little bewildered. You weren't expected to have heard Geraint Evans sing or have read a line of Dylan Thomas; you were just pleased to know that there were people from Wales who had made their mark in the world. It carries on to this day: every Cardiff taxi driver or old lady can recite the names of Wales' top bands - Stereophonics, Manic Street Preachers, Super Furry Animals et al.

At the top were the really big names, the towering historical figures from Owain Glyndwr to David Lloyd George to the entire Welsh rugby team of the early Seventies. In Wales the success of any Welsh person is zealously celebrated in the Welsh press and is, in a funny kind of way, a matter of personal pride to all other Welsh people It's a small country thing. So, growing up, I became aware of a pantheon of famous Welsh people. Not that we would have thought of it in those terms; after all, Dylan Thomas then was scarcely the totemic presence he is today I'd heard of him, of course. The Wales that they - and I - wanted to live in was a place fired with that spirit of Swinging Sixties modernism and not one that harked back to the old Wales that Dylan Thomas came out of.

Except that a moment's reflection reminds me that it's actually a very modern phenomenon, part of the concerted effort Wales has made in recent years to rebrand itself.Growing up in Wales in the Sixties and Seventies, the world of Under Milk Wood was fading into history. I grew up in a Sixties-built house outside Cardiff with parents who had modern art on the walls and listened to the Beatles and Nancy 'n' Lee (before succumbing to a regrettable and very Welsh passion for opera). I was at The Dylan Thomas Centre in Swansea for a wedding reception a couple of months back. It has a bookshop called Dylan's downstairs and a bar upstairs which serves pints of Dylan's Smooth Ale (presumably because he was a smooth kind of guy), and the band that played that night was called Fern Hill after the Dylan Thomas poem. Everywhere you looked there were posters advertising events linked to the 50th anniversary of Dylan's death - the memorial pub crawl with 18 straight whiskeys for all comers was about the only thing lacking - and I have to say it did cross my mind that perhaps we might be reaching saturation point here in Wales vis-?is our national poet. Worth catching for Drew's soaring defence of love over loyalty and Schiller's desperately hurt then hardening anger.All of this week's plays refuse to offer a neat conclusion. Whether one rival brother is going to kill the other hangs in the balance at the end of True West.