The National Theatre inaugurates its spring season at the Olivier with an excellent production of “The Rose Tattoo,” one of Tennessee Williams’s two full-length comedies.   Celebrating such elemental human passions as love, jealousy, and possessiveness, the play is described by Williams as “Dionysian,” as it incorporates love and raucous comedy as did the Grecian rites honoring Dionysus, the god of wine.  In a simple cottage along the Gulf coast between New Orleans and Mobile, in a Sicilian community lives earthy, proud seamstress Serafina Delle Rose.  Pregnant, dressed in pale rose silk, she is awaiting the return of her husband, truck driver Rosario, as the play opens.

As the scene ends, her neighbors bring news that Rosario is dead, and Serafina suffers a miscarriage. The main action begins three years later and takes place within 24 hours.  Serafina now “is wearing a soiled pink slip and her hair is wild,” notes Williams.  Townswomen are banging at the door, demanding the dresses for the high school graduation of their daughters, schoolmates of Rosa, Serafina’s daughter.

  Zoe Wanamaker, with her impeccable flair for timing, brings out the delightful variety of one of Williams’s most memorable heroines. Ms. Wanamaker skillfully maneuvers Serafina’s journey from contented wife to desolate widow to expectant lover who again becomes pregnant.

 With her husband’s death, time stands still for Serafina, who has locked away her emotions, as well as her daughter, fifteen-year-old Rosa, to keep her from encountering the young sailor she loves.  To two riggish women calling for the halter tops Serafina has sewed for them, she brags of her life with Rosario: 

At night I sit here and I’m satisfied to remember, because I had the best…We had love together every night of the week, we never skipped one….”  When they tell her of Rosario’s infidelity, she is enraged, and demands they leave.  Enter Alvaro (Darrell D’Silva), also a truck driver: “My husband’s body with the head of a clown!” marvels Serafina. Their first conversation is a delight, full of hesitation and polite questions:

Serafina: I was a peasant, but I married a baron!....when I didn’t have shoes!

Alvaro:   Excuse me for asking – but where is the baron, now?...

Serafina: Them’re his ashes in that marble urn.

Despite his bumbling, comic behavior, his sexual attractiveness begins to work on Serafina, and they make an assignation for that evening, although her primness decrees that, because of the neighbors, he arrive but pretend to leave and then return.   Comedy prevails throughout their encounter, from her struggles with a too-tight girdle just before he arrives, to his present of a used box of candy, to their wine drinking, to her affirmation of life rather than its rejection.  Her own conversion from bitterness to joy also transposes her attitude towards her daughter.  From locking her away from sailor Jack (“We are Sicilians.  We don’t leave the girls with the boys they’re not engaged to!”) to her acceptance of a new love, Serafina makes her journey from pride to grieving to affirmation.  She has rejected death for life, abstinence for love (for Rosa as well as herself), isolation for the community, and barrenness for pregnancy.   

The play’s ending is celebratory, its merriment a communal one, the women passing along Rosario’s red silk shirt (now Alvaro’s) along from hand to hand, as Serafina calls to him, Vengo, vengo, amore!”

Williams loved symbols, having once noted, “Some critics resent my symbols, but let me ask, what would I do without them?  Without my symbols, I might still be employed by the International Shoe Company in St. Louis.”   The rose, a universal symbol of love, permeates “The Rose Tattoo.”  Serafina wears them in her hair and printed on her dress; there are rose patterns on the carpet, and in vases, and most significantly, tattooed on her husband’s chest (and that of his lover, we learn later).  Alvaro, after meeting Serafina, has a rose tattooed on his chest in the interval between her invitation to return and their assignation that evening.  In his review of the original production, critic John Mason Brown observed, “Not since the Houses of York and Lancaster feuded long and publicly have roses been used more lavishly….To Mr. Williams roses are mystical signs, proofs of passion, symbols of devotion and buds no less than thorns in the flesh.”

While symbolism abounds, the dialogue is heightened and sharpened to give it depth and humor.  Williams creates for Serafina – as he does for Blanche and Amanda – an idiom that is uniquely hers.  Serafina’s dialogue is tough, wisecracking, repetitive, rhythmic, grammatically unstructured, and reverting from English to Italian (easily understood by the audience).  Her sentences are simple and short, her vocabulary limited and reiterative, but the words, rhythms, and repetition become poetic.  Sometimes she rises to simple lyricism, as after she smashes her husband’s urn: “A man, when he burns, leaves only a handful of ashes.  No woman can hold him.  The wind must blow him away.”

It was no secret that Williams created the role for Anna Magnani, the great Italian film star, who plays the role in the 1955 movie version.  Visually and dramatically, she was outstanding, but her dialogue suffered, because she knew no English and learned the lines phonetically.  Daniel Mann’s direction of the film and the first Broadway production meant both were literal and non-poetic, missing the play’s richer values, depths of perception and characterization, nuances, and overall style and spirit. At the National it is in better hands.  Rehearsals began under the direction of Steven Pimlott, whose untimely death led to artistic director Nicholas Hytner completing his friend’s work and steering to the stage this delightful production.  Production dates and ticket orders: www.nationaltheatre.org.uk.