Witness a young actress join the all-time greats
Summer and Smoke
Acertain trepidation attends the West End transfer of Summer and
Smoke, Tennessee Williams’s portrait of a prim young Southern lady trembling with desire for the long-held object of her affection – as revived and reinvented by Rebecca Frecknall at the Almeida in March.
Last time the 1948 play was staged in the West End, back in 2006, the reviews were almost as adulatory as they were in March, and the production could boast a Bond Girl – Rosamund Pike – as its star. Yet the box office was disastrous. The whole thing was gone in a puff after a month.
Might this new arrival therefore be an evening that you can afford to miss? In fact, while I rarely implore readers to cast aside reservations and lunge at a show, I doubt we’ll see a more compelling staging of this underrated work or a lead performance more cherishable than 28-year-old Patsy Ferran’s as the sweetly anguished Alma. It feels impossible to be acclaiming her yet more wildly this time round, but her quicksilver turn is an even more astutely judged mix of smouldering ardency and flickering volatility. On the strength of this she looks set to go on to join the ranks of our finest actors.
Entire dissertations could be devoted to the expressive range of Ferran’s eyebrows, which don’t signal just uplifts of hope or frowning dips of doubt but every necessary quality of quizzicality, comicality and pained tentativeness in between – accompanied by eyes that can widen to something like silent-screen melodrama or narrow into a searching gaze that’s almost maniacal.
Her buttoned-up Mississippi minister’s daughter is first seen hyper-ventilating in panic into a microphone – one of the few modish but non-gimmicky touches in a production whose arresting, abstract signature is a horseshoe range of upright pianos, their fronts removed to expose their mechanisms. Come her final sigh at the end of an evening that has seen those keyboards yield up much plaintive accompaniment it’s as if we’ve witnessed the entire life-cycle of her yearning.
The paradox at the palpitating heart of the drama is that Alma learns to cast aside her Puritanical uptightness just as her coveted neighbour, the doctor’s son John Buchanan, experiences a shift from macho callousness and lusty carnality. “You’ve come around to my old way of thinking and I to yours like two people exchanging a call on each other at the same time, and each finding the other gone out,” says Alma, aghast, in a typically Williams-esque poetic flourish that might sound affected but rings mournfully true – and resonates with the ache that the author himself felt, for years denied outlet for his homosexuality only to find himself slipping uncomfortably, if sensuously, into debauchery.
Fer ran arrive sat a forlorn self composure after being a hilarious pitiable bundle of neuroses, her hands running away with themselves like errant chickens. And there’s equivalent subtlety from Matthew Needham as the brooding alpha male, whose eyes brim as his own demons leave him vanquished too. Around them, in a beautifully lit environment that replicates the Almeida’s earthychurchy back-wall, orbit a company pin-sharp in their sketches of communal and familial folk bored, drifting, addled, controlling.
It might be overstating things to suggest that with millennials reportedly more anxious and averse to sexual relations than was previously supposed, this is a play for today. But Summer and Smoke doesn’t, here, look remotely “remote”. “A sad tale’s best for winter”, as Shakespeare put it – and this one, I think, is tops.