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Southern poem of sexual guilt
SUMMER AND SMOKE
ApolloTheatre
ANY revival of Tennessee Williams is to be welcomed in the West End.
Particularly as Summer and Smoke has not had much of an airing for 55 years.
This is set in the Deep South in 1915-6. Mississippi was Williams’s home territory. Its values, social rigidity sexual restraint, the doctrine of abstinence endorsed by the Bible and various religious authorities were his world.
As always there is a biographical basis. But within this beautiful poetic text, passion is confined to a young beautiful hunk Dr John Buchanan (Chris Carmarck).
He indulges himself with the bottle, betting and lascivious Mexican tarts.
His next door neighbour is the daughter of the pastor and a mentally inadequate mother.
She is Alma (Rosamund Pike) a fragile Southern belle with growing sexuality. She is a tragic portrait and the subject of longing and anguish for the tearaway Dr Buchanan.
Williams’s understanding of this rigid social system and its imposition of stifling attitudes is deeply human in its insight.
Alma suffers from this stifling atmosphere with desires seemingly never to be fulfilled. She holds herself in the vice of prescriptive self-regulation while her father ponders over her next interminable sermon.
Her mad, malicious mother is like a delvisih crone. A replay of Williams’s own early domestic situation. Cormack is as self-assured as any ballsy middle-class boy from next door.
Ms Alma’s unspoken love for him is tearing her apart. Adrian Noble’s production and Peter McIntosh’s design evoke the period. But the production lacks the raw passion of Williams’s work as it delivers.
For Summer and Smoke is a poem of sexual guilt smothering the need for love of another human being. Fifty years later the Beatles sang All You Need is Love. Tennessee Williams would have happily agreed.
Until Feb 3
CNJ booking line: 0870 040 0070
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