Aninsightinto the troubledsoulof Tennessee Williams
Inside Tennessee Williams’ troubled soul
‘ You can’t escape the thought that her home is not the only thing that’s condemned’
Talk To Me Like The Rain
Bewley’s Cafe Theatre, Powerscourt
Until September 9
In the late 1950s, the director Elia Kazan, impatient at the slow progress of a play Tennessee Williams was working on, wrote him a wake-up letter saying: ‘The things that make a man want to write in the first place are those elements in his environment, personal or social, that outrage him, hurt him, make him bleed.’
There were many things that made Williams ‘bleed’ during his turbulent life. He said himself that he found it easier to identify with characters who ‘verge upon hysteria – who were frightened of life’.
As well as the homosexuality that he could only write about in a disguised form, he had suffered with depression from his youth and his plays were starting to get rough treatment from the critics.
Depression was followed by alcoholism and drug dependence. When he was found dead in his New York hotel bedroom in 1983, it seemed like a melodramatic scene from one of his own plays. He either choked on the cap of a spray bottle or from a mixture of alcohol and drugs. The bottle-top story may have been an invention to avert any suggestion of suicide.
Alot of his characters follow his own route of insecurity, family problems and sexual and mental problems, even in these two short, emotionally disturbing but gripping plays.
This Property Is Condemned, written in 1946, shows two teenagers, a boy and a girl, on a railroad track in Mississippi. Willie, the girl (her parents were hoping for a boy), lives alone in a condemned house down the tracks. She recalls her dead sister enjoying life with the railroad workers and Willie is apparently ready for the fun she too can have with those same men, just like her sister. It’s obvious that the sister was no more than a sexual toy for the workers.
Willie is not totally naive and she’s not willing to encourage the young man she’s just met; he’s neither experienced nor rich enough, she says. And yet you can sense an unease in this vivacious girl, stained physically with the dirt of the track, that’s well caught by Maria Guiver, who plays her as apparently self-confident, on the brink of vulnerable sexuality. You can’t escape the thought that her home is not the only thing that’s condemned, that Willie too is condemned – to an unsavoury life, while the young man heading down the tracks with his symbolic kite may have more to reach for. Talk To Me Like The Rain And
Let Me Listen, written in 1953, also has two people, a man and a woman, unnamed, living in a large town, impoverished and hopeless but clinging desperately to the love that holds them together. Having the same two actors onstage almost gives the impression that they could possibly pass for the two characters in the first play years later. But this is a tougher number, essentially consisting of two monologues, contrasting the alcoholic haze of the man, sprawled on a bed, with the desperate poetic vision of the woman’s hopes, heart-breaking in their simplicity, as she sits at a window looking out on the rain.
Daniel Monaghan, gets greater scope in this play, as a man trying to piece together the drunken marathon that ended with him lying in a bathtub of ice cubes in some unknown place. It’s a squalid contrast with the harrowing picture of the woman at the window. Her sad dream of simple future pleasures is even more unlikely than the life of fun Willie in the first play imagines for herself.
The female roles offer greater possibilities for the performers, and Talk To Me is a particularly hard nut to crack. Guiver has a difficult job balancing those harrowing monologues but nonetheless gave an impressive performance in a role that would test a far more experienced performer. And Seamus O’Rourke deserves great credit for the origami-like intricacy of his set design.