Can Britain conquer Broadway?
Theatre
Summer and Smoke
Almeida
★★★★★
Opening in October 1948 while A
Streetcar Named Desire was still running, Tennessee Williams’s
Summer and Smoke – about an uptight Mississippi minister’s daughter who pines for her childhood sweetheart – didn’t find much favour with New York critics, who dismissed it as juvenile, mawkish and monotonous.
But Williams defended its virtues in a letter to a friend: “In a way I love it best of my plays. It is, in a way the most affirmative: that is, spiritually affirmative, and although some reviews call it juvenile, it strikes me as the most grown-up in its thinking and feeling.”
As you watch Rebecca Frecknall’s revelatory revival at the Almeida, it’s hard not to find a vindication for Williams’s words inscribed in every moment of the evening. Directors will often reinvestigate his most-familiar classics – recently Benedict Andrews radically stripped down Cat on a Hot
Tin Roof – but few have the ability to rehabilitate a lesser-regarded play (sniffed at even when it was revived for the first time in London in 50 years in 2006) and raise its status at a stroke. Williams didn’t describe Summer
and Smoke as a “play for pianos”, but there’s something so perfect about Frecknall and her designer Tom Scutt’s placing of the action within a pit encircled by a horseshoe of nine uprights (their front-panels removed, metronomes atop each) that you feel it’s less an imposition than an intuition.
The ensemble are often required to hunch down and tickle the ivories – sometimes the odd note, insistently and sadly hammered, at other points a collective onrush of undulating sounds. It’s as if everything musical about the writing, and everything that’s wordless, ineffable, too, about the story has found its ideal companion.
Admirers of Patsy Ferran have been raving about her for ages now, one critic likening her to a young Maggie Smith. Any lingering doubts as to her protean qualities of expressiveness are extinguished here. Her Alma can move from the tentatively joyous to the unbearably crestfallen within a palpitating heartbeat. She’s hypochondriac, neurotic, pent-up, buttoned-up, gasping for breath, her spirit a-flutter with yearning for a youth (Matthew Needham’s John) who embodies all the physical abandon her religious sensibilities forbid.
Ferran’s waif-life figure suggests a vital life-force trapped within turn-ofthe-century primness. Her Alma is endearing, infuriating, klutzy, clever – doomed by the cruelty of life itself, the law of desire operating in tandem with sod’s law.
A potential liaison is dashed, and by the time she has got off her pedestal to embrace the possibility of carnality, it’s too late. As her almost-beau, initially resistant to her charms and to becoming a medic like his father, Needham, the picture of brooding masculinity, begins with cool, cat-with-mouse detachment but winds up wounded in his own way.
There’s something strikingly timely about his fury at the societal repression and obstruction of pleasure as well as the spectre of loneliness at the evening’s core. Carpe diem, gather ye rosebuds, is the simple message, beautifully expressed. With fine supporting performances across the board (among them from Nancy Crane as Alma’s mother, and Anjana Vasan in four female roles), it’s a case of rush to see this now, or live to regret it.
Until April 7. Tickets: 020 7359 4404; almeida.co.uk