Power Of A Summer Storm

Sydney Morning Herald

Friday June 16, 2000

Reviewed by BRYCE HALLETT

SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER

Belvoir Street Theatre, June 14

Tennessee Williams's view of the theatre was that it shouldn't fall into the rut of naturalism; that the poetic imagination and psychological wounds of his work be manifested in an abstract and heroic way.

In his preface for staging Suddenly Last Summer an inquiring, strongly written play penned in the late 1950s Williams suggests that ``the set may be as unrealistic as the decor of a dramatic ballet" while demanding ``vocal precision and vitality, all the way through ..."

The director Neil Armfield, as he has shown time and time again in his explorations, perfectly understands the theatrical vocabulary necessary to draw out tensions, hysteria and hard divides. He begins with an attention-grabbing flourish and, with no interval, sustains the ``vitality" and pace. In terms of atmosphere, pitch and tone, Company B Belvoir's striking production brings to light and life the terrors, ``hideous" truths and ambiguities colouring the play.

In the big, stretching monologues of Mrs Violet Venable and her niece Catharine Holly, the distorting layers of time and the ``shadow and light" world of Mrs Venable are stripped away with delicate precision, the inner and outer worlds blurring into one.

Gillian Jones makes the archly superior Mrs Venable a graceful, sly woman, as well as a firm, wilful controller of family, servants and acquaintances who happen to cross her outwardly civilised path. With delicacy and poise, Jones makes the tiniest gesture, such as the swooping hand motion of a flesh-eating bird, appear strangely large. And when she says in her imperious, detached tone, ``Most people's lives what are they but trails of debris, each day more debris, more debris, long, long trails of debris with nothing to clean it all up but, finally, death", the delusion and denial of her own path is soon made gloriously clear.

Jones's dramatic command and range finds splendid match in Catherine McClements's potent, slinky and gripping portrayal of the tortured Catharine. With gentle prodding and interrogation by the psychoanalyst Dr Cukrowicz (Malcolm Kennard), the two women the arch possessor and her ``babbling" prey create a fascinating and alarming portrait of Mrs Venable's poet son, Sebastian, a composite drawn from opposite views, be it that of the indulged, unknowable romantic poet or the persecuted boy/man whose homosexuality, self-loathing and destructive energy desire liberation in an era when there appeared to be none.

Written in the late 1950s and first staged off-Broadway in 1958, Williams was heartened by the play's reception, having feared he might be ``critically tarred and feathered and ridden on a fence rail out of the New York theatre".

Possibly he thought the demons of fear, the violent family eruptions and sexual ambiguity expressed in the play were too extreme or unsettling for some. Williams also entertained the notion that the poetic expression of violence in the theatre can be purging for an audience, which is true to a point.

At any rate, I would argue that the great, lasting power of the unsentimental, unexpectedly comic and absorbing Suddenly Last Summer is that its decaying grandeur and the authoritative, quite possibly demonic, will it summons to silence truth implicates us all.

Never for a moment does the playwright put himself outside the play's abrasive frame of judgment, a work which, as Armfield notes, can be read as an allegory of American society and its peculiar paradoxes. Williams is at the harrowing core of the matter at hand. It is through the shadow and light of Mrs Venable's fanciful, soaringly destructive, flights and in Catharine's shuddering fall to hard, truthful ground that we gain penetrating insight into the writer's flawed condition and polar extremes.

The chalky-grey sparseness of Brian Thomson's set design and the brilliance of Nigel Levings's lighting is simple and suggestive, evoking the faded stateliness and style of Mrs Venable and something more sinister and probing when the focus shifts to Catharine.

The supporting actors are excellent, particularly Daniel Wyllie as the waywardly excessive and foppish brother George Holly almost unrecognisable here after Cloudstreet and Lynette Curran as the mad, fussing mother.

Armfield's production nudges the operatic and Paul Charlier's compositions and soundscape underscores the entire play, adding a restless energy and pulse to its crises and revelations. The use of sound is especially effective in the descriptive mythical passages, enabling the language and its repetitions to sing.

Towards the end, when all members of the torn, dysfunctional Holly clan are assembled as though they are confined to an asylum, McClements, exhibiting dazzling control, transforms the sharp, knowing, experienced Catharine into a quaking, fragile, gradually tranquilised creature.

As ``Doctor Sugar" coaxes and pushes her closer to the truth about her cousin Sebastian's destruction and true nature, it brings a blaze of power the like of which is not often seen on stage these days, and which, in McClements's and Jones's hands, makes for extraordinary theatre.