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Confession time for a Menagerie lover
DREAMERS: THREE SHORT TENNESSEE WILLIAMS PLAYS
New End Theatre
THE playwright whose first success was minor masterpiece The Glass Menagerie had a deep impact on the theatre of the 1940s and 50s with his sexual frankness and poetic language.
Williams returned repeatedly to examining the illusion and artifice of women of a certain age, with their veneer of refinement, masking an emotional deprivation and strong yearnings.
But he was unable to write openly about his own sexuality, assailed as he was by guilt and the gaze of his mother, a prudish rector’s daughter. He created ostensibly heterosexual dramas, sometimes transforming anguished and tormented autobiography into artistic metaphors.
The first of these pieces, This Property is Condemned, tells the tale of a young girl, Willie (Anna Doolan), who has been left to fend for herself in a crumbling property.
She carries a crazy doll around and tells a would-be seducer that she has been with “popular railwaymen”.
The second piece is bitter-sweet offering The Lady of Larkspur Lotion. A faded Southern belle – Mrs Hardwick-Moore (Susannah York) – who has been reduced to prostitution, clashes with her landlady, Mrs Wire (Rachel Izen), complaining of flying cockroaches, only to be rescued by a gentleman caller. Larkspur lotion was a treatment for body vermin.
The last piece, Talk to Me Like the Rain, is set in a room in mid-town Manhattan. It concerns a couple trying to hold on to what is left of their relationship.
The pieces were directed by Ninon Jerome. It was nice to see Susannah York making a return to the New End – she made her Blanch Dubois character believable!
But, although I love Menagerie, I find Tennessee oh so turgid. All that pain, angst and guilt! I think I’ll have to go to confession.
Until October 10
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