There is an extraordinary moment in Samuel Hodge’s revival of Tennessee Williams’s memory play when Laura, disabled by shyness and lameness, looks in a mirror. Curtains billow behind her and you are a reminded of a haunting in a horror movie – as if Laura is looking into her own future and seeing herself there. It gives particular poignancy to a later scene in which Laura and her gentleman caller waltz together: a brief moment when time stands still and they cling together, linked by an intense understanding of each other’s disappointment with life.
Hodge’s production is full of good ideas like this, but they don’t cohere. It is too intent on its own conceptual cleverness to deliver a knockout emotional punch. This is an autobiographical play in which Williams tried to expiate his guilt over his institutionalised sister through the story of Tom: a would-be writer with a dead-end job, supporting his suffocating mother and crippled sister until, like his father before him, he makes his escape, with devastating consequences.
Hodge’s smart idea is for us to see the play unfolding as if it is a movie being directed in Tom’s mind’s eye. There are some lovely touches, allowing for both distance shots and closeups in a telescoping design by Ultz. Family scenes are observed by Danny Lee Wynter’s Tom, a dapper Williams lookalike, from afar; curtains suggest hidden emotions; shadows loom in southern gothic style; and images from the family album are projected. We are constantly reminded that memory is fragile and, like film editing, selective.
Wynter, however, placed almost entirely outside the play, never quite inhabits the emotional conflicts of this cold-fish Tom, and all the actors seem stranded in the conceit rather than liberated by it.
- At Nuffield theatre, Southampton, until 31 October. Box office: 023-8067 1771.
