Tennessee Williams called himself “the definition of hysteria”. That state reaches its apogee in Sweet Bird of Youth. Every character quakes or roars. Even the non-metaphorical birds are grotesques, like “pigeons with laryngitis”. The imagery is insistent, unvarying. A girl has been “spayed” as treatment for VD. The boy who infected her expects to have his balls ripped off by an avenging crowd. A mature actress considers age has unsexed her. Politicians take to the podium amid inflamed stories of a white mob castrating a black youth.
Even a director with Jonathan Kent’s panache cannot persuade me that the personal and political aspects of the play really meld. Yet he stages a series of strong moments.
Anthony Ward’s design floats a white mass above the stage: part tousled sheet, part cloud, part unfolding bloom. Brian J Smith captures the bitterness of the boy-turned-gigolo, though it’s hard to decipher his allure. Marcia Gay Harden makes something true out of the ageing actress. She is intuitive as well as bitter. She exposes prejudice by turning herself – by means of makeup and stance – from slob to star. She does so in front of an audience who titter at a woman wearing an oxygen mask and specs.
Meanwhile, dominating the political scenes is an overbearing bully who likes to drag a little woman along to his speeches and gets hecklers roughed up. A convincing Richard Cordery spits out bits of cigar as if he were sending Mexicans back across the border.
