by Tennessee Williams
seen at the Duke of York's Theatre on 21 November 2018
Rebecca Frecknall directs Patsy Ferran as Alma and Mathew Needham as John in this West End transfer of the Almeida production seen at their Islington theatre earlier in the year.
This 1948 play is given an impressionistic outing (designer Tom Scutt), which helps enormously with the fluid sequencing of the action, but also underlines the strange extremes of the situation. Rather than attempting to convey a hot Southern summer with a series of realistic sets, the stage is almost completely bare except for seven upright pianos ranged around the semi-circular back wall of the stage (here, a re-creation of the actual back brick wall of the Almeida theatre). Various characters play on the pianos - sometimes all seven are in use, and only Alma never plays one; and occasionally an actor will walk across the tops of the instruments.
The result is to place the action in an almost dreamlike setting, enhanced by the performance style of the actors. Patsy Ferran begins her portrayal of Alma with a disturbing wordless series of choking sounds in a vain attempt to articulate something, her face held close to a microphone while the other actors play their pianos. It is almost as if we are about to embark on a weird modern opera, although the spoken text soon asserts itself; but we are in any case left in no doubt that here is a troubled and repressed personality. The first half of the play is strongly focussed on her and her inability to respond to the transformation of her childhood friend John's feelings for her as they grow into adulthood.
In the second half, John himself comes into more prominence, and his own alienation in the adult world is seen in counterpoint to Alma's, making the play as a whole far more rich and satisfying, even as the two of them still fail really to connect - she at last ready to countenance the physical side of passion as he, concurrently, moves away from physical desire. We may not be in a literally sultry atmosphere, but the hothouse of disturbed and thwarted passion is still intense and draining.
The cast is superb at handling this difficult material, avoiding the risk of descending into bathos or melodrama, able to sketch out the particular social mores which contribute to Alma's and John's stunted emotional lives, and to deal with the peculiar demands of Tennessee Williams's idiom. In Alma's case this is exacerbated by her attempts to 'anglicise' her Southern pronunciation, giving rise to some very unexpected vowel sounds - it's brilliantly done.
The result is to place the action in an almost dreamlike setting, enhanced by the performance style of the actors. Patsy Ferran begins her portrayal of Alma with a disturbing wordless series of choking sounds in a vain attempt to articulate something, her face held close to a microphone while the other actors play their pianos. It is almost as if we are about to embark on a weird modern opera, although the spoken text soon asserts itself; but we are in any case left in no doubt that here is a troubled and repressed personality. The first half of the play is strongly focussed on her and her inability to respond to the transformation of her childhood friend John's feelings for her as they grow into adulthood.
In the second half, John himself comes into more prominence, and his own alienation in the adult world is seen in counterpoint to Alma's, making the play as a whole far more rich and satisfying, even as the two of them still fail really to connect - she at last ready to countenance the physical side of passion as he, concurrently, moves away from physical desire. We may not be in a literally sultry atmosphere, but the hothouse of disturbed and thwarted passion is still intense and draining.
The cast is superb at handling this difficult material, avoiding the risk of descending into bathos or melodrama, able to sketch out the particular social mores which contribute to Alma's and John's stunted emotional lives, and to deal with the peculiar demands of Tennessee Williams's idiom. In Alma's case this is exacerbated by her attempts to 'anglicise' her Southern pronunciation, giving rise to some very unexpected vowel sounds - it's brilliantly done.
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