Orpheus Descending

by Tennessee Williams

seen at the Menier Chocolate Factory on 25 May 2019

Tamara Harvey directs Hattie Morahan as Lady Torrance, the owner of a convenience store in a small Southern town and Seth Numrich as Val Xavier, an attractive drifter who turns up in town and gets a job as the store clerk. Naturally, despite initial wariness on both sides, the two become lovers, a development fraught with danger in the claustrophobic atmosphere surrounding them.

One can expect sensational but initially unrevealed secrets to dominate a Tennessee Williams play, and this one does not disappoint. Town gossips in the form of two inquisitive housewives inform us that Lady is the daughter of an Italian migrant who set up a drinking 'emporium' by the lake during Prohibition years; when he served drink to negroes the local vigilantes burnt the place down and he died trying to save it. Unbeknownst to Lady, Jabe Torrance, the man she married, led the vigilantes. He is now suffering from cancer, returning from a Memphis hospital soon after Val has turned up in the town.

As if this were not enough, Lady herself has a dark secret relating to her dalliance with a young farmer at the time of her father's death, and Carol, the tearaway sister of this man, claims to have met Val in New Orleans, thus sketching in some background for the mysterious stranger who is evidently trying to turn over a new leaf by taking a lowly job in a store.

The play could easily crumple under the weight of all this exposition, quite apart from the incipient melodrama swirling around the highly strung characters and the deep (and deeply unpleasant) prejudices of the Jim Crow south. It's also apparent that Williams wanted to point to antecedents in Greek tragedy, not only through the title (Val, with his erotic charm, snakeskin jacket, and winsome guitar playing, is a fairly obvious Orpheus-type) but also by using the gossiping women and the two really peculiar female cousins of Jabe Torrance as a chorus witnessing the main events of the protagonists.

Fortunately Tamara Harvey and her cast overcome virtually all the obstacles to create a piece of brooding tension, aided by the gloomy setting in a largely bare stage with a tattered weatherboard wall indicating the general poverty of the district (design: Jonathan Fensom). In particular, Hattie Morahan's Lady is a woman filled with suppressed passion and pain, who gradually unbends; the fact that her awful predicament leads her to contemplate illegal euthanasia, or impels her to scandalise local opinion, only gives her more desperation and determination. Seth Numrich, in his second major Tennessee Williams role in London in recent years, convincingly plays a young man attempting to re-order his life, choosing to interpret this goal as genuine rather than cynical. As a result, his worldly-wise observations acquire an almost mystical flavour at times, resonating with the legendary Orpheus's uncanny skill at evoking responses from his audience - but also rendering his eventual fate inevitable.

This production certainly makes the best of a dramatically overblown and at times rather clunky play, with solid ensemble support and two excellent central performances. It is an interesting (if inadvertent) prelude to a season of four Orpheus-related operas which will be performed by English National Opera later in the year.