SUMMER AND SMOKE at the Almeida Theatre - Body and Soul...

Playwright Tennessee Williams' golden years can be bracketed between 1944 with the astonishing success of THE GLASS MENAGERIE, and the 1963 critical and commercial failure of THE MILK TRAIN DOESN'T STOP HERE ANYMORE - twelve plays in nineteen years which challenged the American theatre to look again at the way those of 'the fugitive kind' survive the cruelties of life and love.

Of those twelve main plays, there are only two I have not yet seen: CAMINO REAL (1953) and PERIOD OF ADJUSTMENT (1960) - a rare Williams comedy - because, thanks to the Almeida Theatre, I can now add SUMMER AND SMOKE to my 'seen' list.

SUMMER AND SMOKE premiered on Broadway in 1948, a year after A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE, but only ran three months, STREETCAR ran for two years!  It was directed by Margo Jones, who had made a name for herself in US regional theatre and been an exponent of theatre-in-the-round.  She had co-directed the original production of THE GLASS MENAGERIE and she lobbied for the director role on SUMMER AND SMOKE.  However the rehearsal period was very troubled resulting in Williams and the cast losing all faith in her.

Off-Broadway director José Quintero staged a revival in 1952 at the Circle In The Square which was well-received and launched the career of actress Geraldine Page: she won a Drama Desk award and, when she recreated her role in the 1961 film version, was nominated for a Best Actress Academy Award.  Williams' returned to the story in 1964, rewriting it as THE ECCENTRICITIES OF A NIGHTINGALE but by the time it was staged in the 1970s, Williams was out of fashion and it ran 20 performances.  Amazingly SUMMER AND SMOKE took nearly sixty years to reach London but it only ran for 6 weeks in the West End, unsurprising with the glacial Rosamund Pike in the lead.

But 12 years later, SUMMER AND SMOKE has reappeared at the Almeida Theatre in a re-imagined production which initially threw me but by the interval I was totally hooked.  Director Rebecca Frecknall has come over all Ivo van Hove and has designer Tom Scutt impose an idiosyncratic visual look to Wiliams' play set in pre-1916 Mississippi but the totally stripped-down playing area distills the action to just the actor and the words; the only furniture are nine stand-up pianos that line up in a semi-circle at the back of the stage with their hardback chairs.

Alma Winemiller lives in the incongruously-named small town of Glorious Hill, the highly-strung daughter of the town's straight-laced minister and his demented wife.  She has grown up across the street from John Buchanan, the virile son of the town doctor, and her unrequited passion for him has been unwavering since school when she embarrassed him with a present of handkerchiefs.  Alma's neurasthenia leads her to have breathless palpitations which means she visits the doctor at all hours but Alma and John, while on friendly terms, cannot give each other what they need.  

Alma, a music teacher who holds raggedy literary 'salons', seeks a spiritual connection - she delights in telling everyone she meets that Alma is Spanish for 'soul' - but John is bored with his medical studies and wants life and excitement which he finds regularly in the Latino quarter outside town, especially at the casino on Moon Lake owned by Pablo Gonzales whose daughter Rosa he is involved with.  Alma's choking primness and nervous mannerisms cannot compete with Rosa's lush sensuality and, after a disastrous date at the casino, the die is cast for them.

Dr. Buchanan leaves to help with an outbreak of fever so John throws a wild party at the surgery to celebrate his engagement to Rosa; a jealous Alma contacts his father who returns to angrily confront the drunken Pablo who draws a gun...  an event that leads to Alma collapsing physically and mentally.  By the time she recovers, the momentous summer is over and life has changed forever: John has taken over his father's work, has renounced his former ways and is engaged to Nellie, one of Alma's singing pupils.  Alma realizes that her former attitudes have made her miss out on engaging with life and love:

'The girl who said 'no' — she doesn't exist anymore, she died last summer — suffocated in smoke from something on fire inside her.'

By stripping the action of all distractions, director Rebecca Frecknall draws you into the lives of John and, in particular, Alma and, while she cannot make much of Williams' 2nd Act melodramatic plot turn, she elicits strong performances from her cast of eight - I didn't even mind the Director Theatre shtick of the cast plonking the pianos for atmosphere...  Frecknall made the scenes between Alma and John crackle with tension, in particular the Act 1 scene where he listened to her heartbeat then held her wrist to check her pulse was played to a silence from the audience, gripped by the action.

There are some standout performances: Anjana Vasan was vibrant playing the contrasting roles of Rosa and Nellie, Nancy Crane was good as Alma's deranged mother as well as the gossipy Mrs. Bassett, and Seb Carrington was particularly good as Archie Kramer, the lonely travelling salesman who Alma meets in the darkening town park under the statue of the angel; an ending which is left nicely ambiguous... will it lead to Alma engaging in life positively or negatively?

Matthew Needham played the role of John well, you suspect that Williams wrote a sounding-board for Alma to be play against than a fully-rounded character but Needham showed both the reckless side of the bored medical student as well as the chastened older John who assumes responsibility with his father's death.

But the play belongs to the actress who plays Alma and Patsy Ferran is inspired casting.  Her slightly 'other' quality works in her favour here; you totally believe that her Alma is unable to fit in to the straightened society of Glorious Hill and the weight of her repressed home life is excellently suggested.  Ferran's quality of stillness here illuminates her character and she negotiates Alma's journey well, despite Williams' tendency to overdo Alma's misfit itchiness.  Ferran starts the play with an extended asthma-style panic attack which really pitches you into the character - as well as being an endurance test for her right at the top of the show.

Alma sits interestingly between two of Williams' previous characters: the over-protected and shy Laura from THE GLASS MENAGERIE and the neurotic gentility of STREETCAR's Blanche - another teacher who has embraced life too dangerously.

Although the play is not the best of Williams' canon - the obvious repetition of the soul (Alma) and the body (John) begin to clang after a while - I am so glad to have finally see it in a production which shows it off to it's fullest potential.

AS YOU LIKE IT at the Olivier, National Theatre... well, did I?

Although it's often produced, I have only ever seen AS YOU LIKE IT once when in 1990 Sophie Thompson played the role of Rosalind for the RSC with a cast including Gillian Bevan, Jerome Flynn, Hugh Ross and Mark Williams.  For some reason I just never get round to seeing it when it is performed... maybe I am in mourning for the fact that I can never see Vanessa Redgrave's legendary star-making performance, again for the RSC in 1962.

But that was then and this is now and 36 years after it's last appearance on the Olivier stage at the National Theatre it has now returned in a production directed by Polly Findlay and designed by Lizzie Clachan, the same team behind last year's TREASURE ISLAND.

The star of that show Patsy Ferran is here returned as Celia, the gentle cousin of the heroine Rosalind who was due to be played by Andrea Riseborough who, when she pulled out citing 'personal reasons', was replaced by Rosalie Craig, an actress more known for musicals.

Now all opinions here must reflect the fact that the production was still in preview so is still feeling it's way through the play with a paying audience.  But as I have oft said before, a paying audience is a paying audience.  Did I like it, AS YOU LIKE IT?  Ummm.... not really if honest.  I found it a superficial production where the set and cast were all surface with no real insight offered or found.

Although she gave a perfectly acceptable performance, there was nothing particularly eye-catching about Craig's Rosalind.  Here one of Shakespeare's most memorable female characters seemed on a powered by a fairly neutral star wattage.  Patsy Ferran is also showing signs of becoming an eccentric stage actress which works well for most of the production but eventually you can have enough of her gauche line readings and dizzy perambulations around the stage, like a pixilated unicyclist who has come off her bike.

It can't be often that one leaves AS YOU LIKE IT thinking that the actor playing Orlando gave the best performance but Joe Bannister was a strong presence onstage but also giving a light comic shading to galumphing but loving Orlando.

I didn't find either Mark Benton as Touchstone of Paul Chahidi as Jaques to be as particularly funny as they should have been, Chahidi underplaying to such an extent that I felt in some scenes that his suit had been send out with him not in it.

However I did like Patrick Godfrey's feisty retainer Adam, John Ramm's exiled Duke and Gemma Lawrence's headstrong Phebe.  There was however a truly ghastly performance from Leo Wringer as the usurping Duke Frederick, it was real Amateur Hour in the Duchy.

As with TREASURE ISLAND, Clachan provides a big OOOOOOH moment when her set transforms itself totally.  The set for the Duchy is a presumably deliberately ugly open-plan, low ceilinged office which did not so much suggest the Court of the Duchy than the IT room of a Las Vegas gambling casino.  When Rosalind, Celia and Touchstone escape from the nasty Duke's court into the forest of Arden, the whole metal set is lifted from the back to noisily clang and clank itself up to the full height of the Olivier stage - tables, chairs, light-fittings etc. all hang down like an industrialised forest.  All terribly impressive but once it's done we are stuck with it and apart from the odd pretty lighting effect through the dangling metal it ultimately again strikes one as a fairly shallow experience.  Christina Cunningham's costumes are also quite ugly.

So, more a case of AS YOU DIDN'T LIKE IT.  Owen enjoyed it much more than I did and I might be willing to give it another go after they have all settled into the run but it was all a bit disappointing on the first visit.

The 7 Shows of Xmas 6: TREASURE ISLAND

To paraphrase Cole Porter: another ev'nin', another show...  This time it was back to the ever-welcome comfort of the Olivier stalls to see the latest in the National Theatre's Christmas productions based on literary children's books.  However this year Robert Louis Stevenson's TREASURE ISLAND has been given a particular female twist.

The production is directed by Polly Findlay and the adaptation by Bryony Lavery has reassigned Jim Hawkins to being a girl along with sex changes for Dr. Livesey and several pirates.

To be honest I was dreading what had been done to the story - revisionism for -isms sake? - but after a short while I didn't notice the gender shifts.  I guess it's all about finding the right actress to play the role rather than doing it for the role's sake and they have found the perfect actress to play plucky Jim in Patsy Ferran.

After impressing in her West End debut earlier this year as the gauche servant Edith in BLITHE SPIRIT, here she is a natural centre of attention with her sly wit and bright personality.  What a year she has had!

Actually she gives such a winning performance that she quite pulls the focus from Arthur Darvill as the show's famous villain Long John Silver.  Playing against the stereotypical representation of the character, Darvill's Silver is a cunning, sly adversary who easily infiltrates himself among the crew aboard Squire Trelawney's ship which sets out to find the titular island.  His performance is in keeping with the 'ensemble' feel of the show - but damn it all, this *is* the Olivier stage, an easy place to get lost if you are not flashing the bottle a bit.

Apart from Gillian Hanna as Jim's sparky Innkeeper grandmother, the cast are by and large anonymous although I liked Nick Fletcher's egotistical Squire and Tim Samuels as the aptly-named Grey, a sailor so anonymous the pirates forget to tie him up with the others.

There is also a great animatronic parrot playing Silver's ever-watchful Captain Flint which steals scenes easier than any pirate.

The National has also called again on it's favourite folk composer John Tams whose songs are atmospheric enough to give you a flavour of shanties heard through a dense fog.  Dan Jones' score and in particular his chilly soundscape help conjure the mood too.

The other big plus for the production is Lizzie Clachan's ingenious set which uses the Olivier revolve well, none more so than when the Squire's ship, the Hispaniola, rises majestically into view from what had been the desolate Inn minutes before.  The large curved plinths that surround the stage are also an excellent design choice suggesting both the bare bones of a ship's hull... and just bare bones!

 

Looking back, my only real annoyance was Lavery's overuse of archaic poetical speech patterns for Jim which sometimes pulled the focus away from the actual play and character.  Also, oddly enough for a show that succeeded so well with the onstage mise-en-scene, the occasional use of lighting cues above the audience to suggest the parrot's flight were usually mis-timed and a bit confusing.  This was also the case with the final effect - what should have been a haunting 'button' actually was a bit of a clunker.

But I was surprised how much I enjoyed the show and the good news is that Treasure Island fan and secret pirate king Owen was hugely impressed with it.

New Year ahoy!