First produced off Broadway in 1958, Tennessee Williams’s one-act drama, in which a disturbed but apparently sane young woman is blackmailed into submitting to a lobotomy, is the theatrical equivalent of a short, sharp shock. In fact, it is less a play than an extended metaphor building towards a horrifying, Dionysian conclusion.
You can sense that there’s something unpleasant on the menu when Mrs Venable, a cadaverous Louisianan dowager, spends the first scene introducing a young psychiatrist to the collection of Venus fly-traps collected by her deceased son, Sebastian; an aesthete and traveller who produced a single, hand-printed poem annually on the expectation that posterity would be his judge. She then embarks on a long, unnecessary reminiscence about gulls devouring newly hatched turtles on a beach; before we finally meet the traumatised Catherine, whose recollection of Sebastian’s demise is so gruesome you begin to feel nostalgic for the turtles.
To her credit, Emily Tucker turns this histrionic monologue into a theatrical aria so compelling it produces genuine palpitations. The sense of an operatic mad-scene is reinforced in Mary Papadima’s swampy production by Ben Ingles’s doctor affecting a Louisianan lilt so soft and musical he appears to be singing the part.
The evening is filled out by a fascinating fragment of Williams exotica, Mister Paradise, which was only rediscovered among a collection of the playwright’s early one-act exercises in 2000. It too concerns the disillusionment of a poet the world is likely to forget, though compared with Sebastian’s output, Anthony Paradise’s slim volume, discovered in an antique store propping up a table leg, is positively prodigious. It basically consists of two speeches, in which an idealistic admirer, played with ardent enthusiasm by Charlotte Mulliner, offers public rehabilitation to which Peter Macqueen’s Emersonian sage politely declines. It’s no masterpiece, but there’s just about enough material to prevent a table from wobbling.
- In repertory at Theatre by the Lake, Keswick, until 4 November. Box office: 01768 774411.
