It’s great — if you can stay awake!
THEY were dozing within 15 minutes of the start at Chichester’s Festival Theatre on Monday night. In my row alone, three audience members had their eyes closed.
The person to blame is playwright Tennessee Williams, one of the great snooze-inducers of 20th-century American drama. And yet the theatre Establishment adores him.
His Sweet Bird Of Youth gives us a fading film star and her gigolo on a trip to Fifties Deep South U.S. The opening scene is of the morning after the night before: a hotel’s empire-sized bed, hangovers, saxophone soundtrack. Suspended overhead is a large model of a white sheet on which images of scudding gulls are projected.
Hollywood grande dame Alexandra del Lago (Marcia Gay Harden) and her rough lover Chance (Brian J. Smith) have arrived in his hometown. Chance wants to see the young girlfriend he had to leave here some years ago after giving her a bad dose of the clap. The girl’s father is local politician Boss Finley, a racist tub-thumper who would willingly have Chance castrated.
Ms Harden imbues del Lago with autumnal glamour. She gives a little gurgly growl of lust as she contemplates her fancy-man. But I wonder if she and co-star Mr Smith are five years or more too young for their parts. The bloom needs to be off this rose a little more.
Anthony Ward’s set is gorgeously done, if a bit stranded on Chichester’s enormous stage. Director Jonathan Kent gives us TV screens on which we can watch a stump speech by Finley (a fine Richard Cordery). Whirr, click, down come the screens from the theatre ceiling, wrenching us out of the Fifties. That is not the only moment when the dating seems a bit off. Victoria Bewick’s Heavenly looks nothing like a Fifties Southern belle (albeit a broken one). What a rotten part Heavenly is, mind you.
The absence of a love scene between her and Chance is this play’s worst failing.