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.

Kreutzer vs Kreutzer

by Laura Wade

seen at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse on 12 July 2015

This new 'play for voices' features Katherine Parkinson as 'Woman' and Samuel West as 'Man', with Thomas Gould (violin) and Ana-Maria Vera (piano) playing Beethoven's Violin Sonata No. 9 (the 'Kreutzer' ), and Thomas Gould (first violin), Jamie Campbell (second violin), Max Baillie (viola) and Minat Lyons (cello) playing Janáček's String Quartet No. 1 (the 'Keutzer Sonata'). It is directed by Tamara Harvey.

Laura Wade has had the brilliant idea of linking three famous works - the two musical pieces mentioned above and Tolstoy's story 'The Kreutzer Sonata' - in a meditation on the fraught relationships between men and women. Tolstoy's story is related by a man who has killed his wife from jealousy when she has begun an affair with a musician friend of his while they were practising Beethoven's sonata together. Janáček's quartet, in turn, is a response to Tolstoy's story, inflected by his own unconsummated passion for a young married woman (Kamila Stösslová) to whom he wrote more than 700 letters towards the end of his life.