Tennessee, Rose, Pleasance Dome ★★★
Clare Cockburn's new play posits the notion that all the women in Tennessee Williams' work were inspired in some way by his older sister, Rose, who spent most of her life in mental institutions after being lobotomised.
It’s a long way from the dank chill of an English winter to the stultifying heat of a New Orleans summer, but we’ve been here before at this venue. Five years on from their award-winning Summer And Smoke, Rebecca Frecknall is back in the director’s chair and Patsy Ferran in the lead role for Tennessee Williams’ exploration of frailty and fear, A Streetcar Named Desire.
The stage is cluttered with objects; a pianola sits stage left; a large cabinet, soon to be revealed as a display case for tiny glass ornaments, dominates the centre. A man, gaunt, in his 40s perhaps, wanders among this stuff.
It’s the trivia question no one ever thought to ask: where was the only Tennessee Williams play premiered outside America first performed?
Kindred literary spirits who overlapped in any number of ways make for riveting stuff in Truman & Tennessee: An Intimate Conversation. Filmmaker Lisa Immordino Vreeland folds archival footage of the legendary writers together with recitations from their life and art spoken by Jim Parsons and Zachary Quinto.
Can we really be entering a third month in lockdown? Indeed we can, and culture, thank heavens, shows no signs whatsoever of leaving us in the lurch. This week's lineup of highlights offers a typically electic bunch, ranging from two sizable American talents streaming a two-hander for one night only to the arrival online of the latest work from an octogenarian playwriting treasure, Sir Alan Ayckbourn, who ought to be more celebrated of late than he is.
Lia Williams is not an actor who looks for easy options. Twice she has played two characters in the same production, switching between them for different performances. In Pinter's Old Times in 2013 she and Kristin Scott Thomas alternated Anna with Kate, dancing competitive rings around Rufus Sewell's Deeley, and in Mary Stuart at the Almeida she and Juliet Stevenson flipped a coin to decide, minutes before the play began, which of them would play Elizabeth or Mary.
Where would Tennessee Williams's onetime flop be without the British theatre to rehabilitate it on an ongoing basis?
That this 1948 Tennessee Williams play is rarely performed seems nothing short of a travesty, thanks to the awe-inspiring case made for it by Rebecca Frecknall’s exquisite Almeida production.
"Maggie the cat is alive: I am alive," or so remarks the feline, eternally frustrated heroine of Tennessee Williams's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. That self-assessment has rarely been truer than as spoken by Sienna Miller in the terrific West End production directed by Benedict Andrews, in which the actress finally lands the stage role in which she can let rip.