This is a strange play to find on the sprawling Chichester stage. It is the work of Tennessee Williams, boasts two fine American actors in Marcia Gay Harden and Brian J Smith and is stylishly directed by Jonathan Kent. But a third of the action is taken up with an intimate bedroom encounter that looks lost in this epic space. It is only when the play opens out to embrace the public world that the production fully colonises its chosen venue.
First seen on Broadway in 1959, the piece still strikes me as second-division Williams in which his magnanimity of spirit is cloaked in melodrama. At the start we see Chance Wayne, a would-be actor turned hustler, holed up in a ritzy Gulf Coast hotel with Alexandra del Lago, a fading star in flight from an apparently disastrous movie comeback. It turns out that this is Chance’s native town and his aim, apart from fleecing Alexandra, is to be reunited with his teenage lover, Heavenly. In the course of his stay, he not only learns that he previously infected Heavenly with a venereal disease that necessitated a hysterectomy, but that her father, the all-powerful Boss Finley, intends to see him run out of town or castrated.
Like much of Williams’s work, the play is filled with the poetry of desperation. You feel Williams identifies with, and understands, his two principal characters: the once-golden Chance, worried about his thinning hair, and the ageing Alexandra, who quietens the “unsatisfied tiger” that rages within her through sex, dope and drink.
Williams is a much more political writer than is usually allowed, but there is something strained about his suggestion that Heavenly’s sterility affects her father’s racist politics and there is much in the action that defies belief. You wonder how Chance can have remained as ignorant of Heavenly’s plight as Alexandra is of her recent movie’s hit-status, and when Chance asks us to recognise ourselves in his willing acceptance of martyrdom, I frankly demur.
Even if the story, with its Easter Sunday setting, strives after symbolism, it still gives its actors enough realistic meat to chew on. Harden – whose own movies range from Miller’s Crossing to Fifty Shades of Grey – is excellent as Alexandra. She plays her not as some Sunset Boulevard monster but as a believable woman with a sharp wit, a raucous laugh and a palpable hunger for sex that leads her to run her fingers over her lover’s torso as if she were playing an instrument. She also conveys her compassion for a man who has what she terms, in a typical Williams phrase, “the stiff-necked pride of the defeated”.
Smith has a tougher time with Chance, whose noisy eruption in a cocktail lounge would not, you feel, go unchecked. But he perfectly captures not only the narcissism of this self-seeking gigolo but his pathos. Richard Cordery, elongating his southern vowels, is first-rate as the bigoted Boss Finley and there is good work from Victoria Bewick as his exploited daughter and Emma Amos as his subversive mistress. Anthony Ward’s designs also convey the echoing opulence of this palm-fringed, tropical hotel. But, for all the skill of Kent’s production, Williams’s play is suffused with an overblown romanticism.
• At Chichester Festival theatre until 24 June. Box office: 01243 781312.
