At the National Theatre in London, Glenn Close is a definitive Blanche, the desperate heroine of Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire. In a memorable performance that combines sensitivity, vulgarity, and lyricism, Ms. Close enters the French Quarter of New Orleans to announce to the women seated on the doorstop, “They told me to take a streetcar named Desire, and then transfer to one called Cemeteries and …get off at Elysian Fields!” The counterpoint of desire and death is a leitmotif of the play, as Ms. Close impressively makes clear.  Dressed in white, fluttery and uncertain (Williams says like a “moth”) she tells herself, “I’ve got to keep hold of myself!”  Her nervousness at meeting her sister Stella  (Essie Davis) allayed somewhat by whiskey, she confesses that through family deaths they have lost their plantation home, Belle Reeve.  The first of Blanche’s ‘arias,’ on death, symbolized by the streetcar Cemeteries, is rendered beautifully and lyrically by Ms. Close.

 In her first encounter with Stanley, her sister’s macho hunk of a husband, Blanche uses sexuality as her weapon.  Their verbal sparring has an erotic undertone, and it is surprising but significant that Blanche understands immediately the expression “shack up,” from Stanley’s army past. In a fine interpretation, Iain Glen brings not only muscularity but also sensitivity to Stanley, and there is desperate humor on Blanche’s part as she attempts to explain the loss of the sisters’ property to a man who believes in Huey Long and the Napoleonic Code (“that which belongs to the wife belongs to the husband also.”) She is so coquettish in this scene that Stanley is led to remark, “If I didn’t know that you was my wife’s sister I’d get ideas about you.”

  In this poetic, non-realistic play Stanley has a poetry of his own that is particularly his; it is heightened, alliterative, rhythmic, as when he is “unpacking” Blanche’s trunk: “Genuine fox fur-pieces, a half a mile long!  Where are your fox-pieces, Stella?  Bushy snow-white ones, no less!  Where are your white fox pieces?”  As has no actor before him, Mr. Glen (who played Henry V) is adept at realizing this underlying quality of Stanley’s dialogue.

 Ms. Close articulates her performance so that it progresses to its doomed, inevitable climax.  Alarmed at drunken Stanley’s abuse of Stella at his “poker night,” the next morning Blanche pleads in what is the most lyrical of the arias, and the most difficult, impressively expressed by Ms. Close as she pleads with her sister to leave “ape-like” Stanley, ending:  “In this dark march toward whatever it is we’re approaching. . . . Don’t – don’t hang back with the brutes!” Unfortunately this is overheard by Stanley. Realizing that he may lose Stella if Blanche succeeds, former soldier Stanley will fight in his own way – coarse, direct, and brutal.

  Though Blanche has tried to leave behind her the encounters with death that drove her to desire “intimacies with strangers,” Stanley uncovers her promiscuity in the past and reports it to his buddy Mitch (Robert Pastorelli), who has proposed marriage to Blanche but now rejects her.  Her one hope for the refuge she sought now dashed, she defends herself to Mitch, who is about to cruelly expose her face to the naked light bulb she had masked with a colored paper lantern:  “I don’t want realism. I want magic!…I don’t tell truth, I tell what ought to be truth.”  The end is foretold as the Mexican Woman enters, calling “Flowers for the Dead,” as Blanche reprises her vigil with a dying relative, explaining to Mitch, “The opposite is desire.  So do you wonder?”

 In the penultimate scene, Blanche’s madness is convincingly portrayed by Ms. Close, different from her earlier hysteria, but now seemingly inevitable as the tension mounts to her rape by Stanley. By the final departure, Ms. Close has created such strong sympathy for Blanche, the audience is brought to the terror and pity of tragedy, as she is led away by the doctor, one of the strangers on whose kindness she has always depended.

 The four principals in this poetic drama are unfortunately placed by director Trevor Nunn within a realistic setting by Bunny Christie that is at odds with what Williams asks for in the text.   The Kowalski’s cramped living quarters in which Blanche is “caught in a trap” with only a thin curtain between the two rooms, in this production include, via a turntable, the living room, kitchen with 40’s Frigidaire and stove, bedroom, and bathroom  -- Blanche’s unseen (in the text) retreat -- with all fixtures, including running water.  Williams, who attacks kitchen-sink naturalism, is here presented in entirely realistic terms in an entirely realistic, non-symbolic set.

Nor does the live music sound like a New Orleans jazz trio with a “blue piano.” The  “rickety outside stairs” of the fading house he describes here become an ornamental, long winding staircase resembling a 30s walkway for chorines.  A large bed with interior-decorator long drapes descending from its head is wrong (Blanche, says the directions, “hides behind the screen at head of bed.”)  The bed dominates the “other” room, so that nothing is left to the imagination, including Stanley’s rape of Blanche. The street people at whom Blanche recoils are more CarolinaCatfish Row, out of “Porgy and Bess.” Vendors parade across the front of the stage crying their wares (and detracting from the importance of the single Mexican Woman selling wreaths for the dead) rather than a few menacing street people seen through “the back wall of the rooms which have become transparent” that Williams calls for.

 In his autobiography, Memoirs, Williams sees Blanche as “a relatively imperishable creature of the stage,” and observes that “nearly all of her cries to the world in her season of desperation have survived because they were true cries of her embattled heart; that is what gave them the truth which has made them live on…”  We are grateful to Ms. Close for her excellent depiction of Blanche and the “true cries of her embattled heart.

(Observations and quotes from Tennessee Williams are from my book Understanding Tennessee Williams published by the University of South Carolina Press, 1995)

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

“Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” now at the Lyric Theatre in London is a powerful play, perhaps Williams’s most powerful, because it concerns the family caught in a crisis common to most  – the imminent death of its head: “I’m trying to catch that true quality of experience in a group of people,” wrote Williams, “that cloudy, flickering, evanescent – fiercely charged! – interplay of live human beings caught in the thundercloud of a common crisis.” 

 Williams daringly constructed act one as a virtual monologue by Maggie, whom he describes as “charming,” obviously thinking of Southern women, with their good looks and musicality of voice he so admired that he wrote some of his best dramatic poetry for Maggie and others who, like her, are steel magnolias -- Alexandra in “Sweet Bird of Youth” and Hannah in “The Night of the Iguana,” which follow “Cat.” Maggie likens herself to a cat on a hot tin roof because she is in a desperate position, trying to woo back her indifferent husband Brick and conceive a child that will guarantee their inheritance of the vast plantation of his father, Big Daddy. She also must outwit her grasping brother-in-law Gooper and his wife who, together with their progeny, are flattering and fawning to gain control of Big Daddy’s millions as soon as he dies of the terminal cancer of which he is unaware.

 But hardly catlike in her movement, with awkward gestures and flat voice, Frances O’Connor’s wiry Maggie comes across as determined but hardly appealing as Brick, lounging on a settee, ignores her.  The handsome former athlete cannot move from their room because he is on crutches, having broken his leg the night before when, drunk, he tried and failed to clear hurdles on a track that like the hurdles in his life, have become insurmountable. (“Where would I be without my symbols?” asks Williams)

The action intensifies to a climax of pure, gripping theater in act two in a confrontation between Brick and Big Daddy, expertly enacted by Brendan Fraser and Ned Beatty.  The ravages of time and the certainty of death are the twin themes, as Williams explores the father-son relationship, rife with accusation, self-delusion and self-doubt, stripping away the pretense each detests and arriving at the painful truth.  As Brick, who drowns his guilt in alcohol, Fraser is a find for the theater.  When he appeared in the 1992 film “School Ties” as a high-school football quarterback, he already was displaying the sensitivity that serves him well as former athlete Brick, one of Williams’s most difficult roles because of its sexual ambiguity, which Williams insisted upon (and defended).

 In addition, Brick, as Arthur Miller notes, is  “a lonely young man sensitized to injustice.  Around him is a world . . .of grossness, Philistinism, greed, money-lust, power-lust….In contrast Brick conceives of his friendship with his dead friend as idealistic….”  Against the gross world, whose mendacity disgusts him, Brick might fight as hard as he did on the football field, but he knows he will not win against Time.  He confesses to his father, “Time just outran me, Big Daddy – got there first.” In addition to looking the part of a former football star, Fraser movingly conveys the complexity of this troubled young man.

In their act two battle of wills, Williams exposes the truths each character must accept about himself : Big Daddy’s facing up to his mortality and Brick’s guilt over his friend Skipper, whom he deserted after Skipper confessed his homosexual love.  As Big Daddy, Ned Beatty is not physically large like Burl Ives in the original production and the film, but Beatty is a consummate actor who portrays a complicated man, with both the strength and the vulnerability of a redneck plantation owner who began as a tramp and fought his way to the top.

 Beatty well demonstrates what Williams describes as the “crude eloquence” of Big Daddy in this second-act scene as he responds to Brick’s complaint about mendacity:  “Think of all the lies I got to put up with! – Pretenses!  Ain’t that mendacity?…Having for instance to act like I care for Big Mama!… Church! – it bores the Bejesus out of me. . . .Clubs! -- Elks! Masons! Rotary! – crap!”   His foil, Big Mama, loving and long-suffering, covers her hurt with jokes, and Gemma Jones is excellent in revealing the depths of this woman who finds good in her husband even as he disparages her.

The scene between son and father, described by Brick as “painful,” hit home with the original audience as well.  In the intermission following it, first nighters stood around the lobby silent and visibly shaken – among them parents with whom the scene obviously struck a chord of recognition.

It is not clear why the director, Anthony Page, chose the inferior Act 3, or “Broadway version” over the one Williams preferred. The original third act, as written, was used by Howard Davies in his highly successful 1988 National Theatre production in London and on Broadway, which proved the superiority of the act as the playwright first wrote it.

 Williams reveals in the printed version of the play, which contains both act threes, that he was coerced by Kazan, the original director, to rewrite the scene, bringing back Big Daddy (who does not appear in the original act three), who tells a coarse joke as a storm breaks out;  Brick does a turn-about (insisted on by Kazan) and becomes a cheering section for Maggie and her lie about conceiving, and the act ends with a truly corny line, mercifully omitted in the current production, which at least restores the original final line.

 Williams explains, “I wanted Kazan to direct the play and . . . I was fearful I would lose his interest.”  Regarding his changing the character of Brick in act three to suit Kazan, Williams states,  “I felt that the moral paralysis of Brick was a root thing in his tragedy.. . .because I don’t believe that a conversation, however revelatory, ever effects so immediate a change in the heart or even conduct in a person in Brick’s state of spiritual disrepair.”  Had Page consulted Kazan’s autobiography A Life regarding the rewrite, he would have learned that Kazan also regretted the change: “I took liberties with his work to yield to my own taste and my overriding tendencies.”

So we have a somewhat flawed yet compelling production because of the power of act two and the excellence of most of the cast, among whom also should be mentioned Clive Carter as Gooper, Brick’s grasping lawyer brother (probably based on Williams’s lawyer brother Dakin) and Abigail McKern as his malicious wife Mae.  The evocative setting is by Maria Bjornson.  Bill Kenwright, noted for worthwhile productions (he brought in “Ghosts” earlier this season), is the producer.

Suddenly Last Summer

When Suddenly Last Summer opened off Broadway in 1958, Tennessee Williams, who harbored an inordinate fear of bad reviews, planned to leave for Japan immediately after the premiere, so that he wouldn’t have to read them.  “I expected to be run out of town on a rail,” he confessed.  Fortunately, he delayed his departure, and enjoyed the critical approval of “Garden District,” which included “Something Unspoken” as an opener, followed by the ninety-minute “Suddenly Last Summer.”  Now it is revived in a stunning production at the Albery Theatre in which Christopher Oram’s set is itself a metaphor: a garden, where the action takes place, like a tropical jungle filled with red, saw-toothed tree flowers, including a Venus Flytrap.

Set in the wealthy Garden District of New Orleans, the play is described by Williams as “a short morality play in a lyrical style.”  We never see the main subject of the play, Sebastian, son of matriarch Mrs. Venable.  To a young doctor she has summoned, she describes her son as resembling the saint for whom he is named.  Brilliantly portrayed by Diana Rigg, white-haired and bejeweled, she shines with pride as she recounts that Sebastian and she were inseparable, traveling to the world’s fashionable (and unfashionable) watering holes, with a group of young, beautiful people surrounding them.  They were a shining couple, known to all, called by their first names, like Shakespeare’s twins in “Twelfth Night,” whose names they bear. A “chaste” aesthete and poet, Sebastian wrote one poem each year, concluding it in the summer of their travels.

 As Ms. Rigg recounts their idyllic existence, every nuance of the character comes into play – her dedication to Sebastian, her joy in serving his every whim, even to deserting a dying husband to remain abroad with her son, and her delight in the reaction of others to the beauty they exude.  But when she suffered a disfiguring stroke last summer, Sebastian chose his cousin Catherine as his traveling companion to Cabeza de Lobo (head of the wolf).  No longer young and attractive, Mrs. Venable realizes she has been replaced by one who is.  Suddenly Sebastian dies there.

Abandoning her earlier, beautifully delivered idolatry, a harsher Mrs. Venable demands that the doctor perform a lobotomy on Catherine, who has been “babbling” about Sebastian’s death, “telling lies” harmful to his legend.  The doctor’s reward will be an endowment for his hospital. With Catherine’s entrance, brought by a nun from the mental hospital where she is confined, Mrs. Venable grows accusatory and threatening.  Catherine’s mother and brother also have been summoned. Mrs. Venable needs them to agree to the brain operation if they want the inheritance Sebastian has left them. As played by Abigail McKern, Mrs. Holly is like Amanda in “The Glass Menagerie,” scatterbrained but worth our pity as well as our laughter.  Son George (Patrick Kennedy) totally lacks the charm attributed to Sebastian, whose clothes he wears.

As Catherine, Victoria Hamilton’s account of Sebastian’s demise is skillfully rendered, for she must both enact a nervous, possibly insane young woman and at the same time deliver the sordid details of their trip, including Sebastian’s unsaintly behavior, building up to the harrowing account of his death. Ms. Hamilton so expertly conveys this dramatic narrative in all its horrifying details that we must agree with the doctor that Catherine could be telling the truth, that Sebastian was a predator who used his female companion to lure his victims, some of whom he recognizes among his attackers.  As told by Ms. Hamilton, Catherine’s story evokes not only terror, but also pity.  Michael Grandage has staged a production that superbly brings to life Tennessee Williams’s unique theatrical genius that depicted violence but stressed compassion. (Albery Theatre, St. Martin’s Lane London WC2N 4AH, phone: 0870 060 6621) More on Tennessee Williams in Let’s Celebrate

For Tennessee Williams’s life, art, and plays not reviewed in this Archive, see Archive of Major Playwrights.