You've been to your last play of the year and the theatreless tundra of Christmas week is stretching out ahead of you. How to cope? I know how I'll be getting through it. Last year I fled to Berlin, where playhouses are open on Christmas Day; this time round my household's hunkering down with a stack of Tennessee Williams DVDs, starting with A Streetcar Named Desire.
It's been far, far too long since I've seen Vivien Leigh in a fug of bathtub steam and Marlon Brando's bull-like torso squeezed into an assortment of dirty, skin-tight tee-shirts (come to think of it, I bet he didn't change his vest once during shooting). And I can't wait to hear the latter's furry mumblings again.
Just as enticing is the thought of Katharine Hepburn playing a woman so steely you'd think she gargled daily with iron filings in Gore Vidal's lusciously bonkers adaptation of Suddenly, Last Summer. And it's almost impossible to imagine a more luminous performance than Carroll Baker's in Baby Doll - the closest Williams got to writing a comedy. Only a young Jessica Lange might have nailed this role - all petulance and tease - so well.
And oh, all those mouthwatering extras and original trailers with fabulously OTT captions! The poster on Sweet Bird Of Youth's cover trumpets: "He used love like most men use money". These movies are still gagging to be watched.
Williams was just as interested in film as theatre: he wrote many of the screen adaptations of his plays himself - often for the same Broadway casts - and fascinating differences slink into the scripts to get past Hollywood censors. Cat On A Hot Tin Roof attempts to drain away the inference that there might have been more bang and sizzle between Paul Newman and his dead best buddy than he has with Elizabeth Taylor.
Now, a friend has suggested that spending the holidays inside Tennessee's head might not be that, well, cheery. She may be thinking of lines like: "Most people's lives - what are they but long trails of debris, with nothing to clean it up but, finally, death?" But I say, what better way to face the New Year than to watch this blessedly great playwright take scissors to his characters' threadbare illusions?
I'll report back on this marathon viewing session in 2007. Why not tell us what art is going to see you through the dregs of the year?
