Can’t visit the Festival? Improvise with a treat
Impro Theatre’s Tennessee Williams UnScripted (online) An eruption of talent ★★★★★
TenneSSee Williams wrote some of the greatest plays in the American literary canon: Cat On A Hot Tin Roof; A Streetcar named Desire; The Glass Menagerie.
eruptions, filmed live at the end of LA-based Impro Theatre’s ten-month residency at the edye at the Broad Stage, isn’t one of them. And there’s a very good reason for that.
The play’s basis was suggested by the audience at the start of Act I and the title at the start of Act II.
But then making it up as you go along is exactly what this Williams comedy pastiche/homage is all about.
And Impro Theatre’s excellent ensemble, including Mike McShane (Whose Line Is It Anyway?) and edi Paterson (HBO’s The Righteous Gemstones; Knives Out), make an outstanding job of it here.
Improv theatre is nothing new at the Fringe. In fact, this year aside, there’s normally more to choose from than you can shout a suggestion at. not all of them of the same calibre.
But when it’s done well it’s a real treat. Which is exactly what this unscripted slice of Southern melodrama is.
not only that, but it pulls off the tricky feat of being not just funny, but getting under the skin of what makes Williams’s plays tick and his writing so great.
With ‘volcano’ the chosen option, suddenly we find ourselves in a resort hotel conveniently situated in sight of one.
We are in the company of broken people – a composer with writer’s block; a writer with a degree in languorous homespun philosophising; a neglected wife; a small-town girl with a heavy cross to bear; a wisecracking horn player; and two churchgoing sisters.
Cue colliding passions, sexual tension, one-to-one confessionals, fiery remonstrations and all manner of repressed emotions played out against a mix of stretched metaphors, spur-ofthe-moment dialogue and the bawling of Southern belles.
It was F Scott Fitzgerald who famously wrote The Crack-Up, although the description fits so many Williams characters.
And crack up is exactly what you’ll do watching this.