The human condition at its rawest
Theatre Orpheus Descending Menier Chocolate Factory, London SE1
We’re enjoying a rare burst of imaginatively re-embraced lesser plays by Tennessee Williams. After Rebecca Frecknall’s revelatory rendering of Summer and Smoke and ahead of The Night of the Iguana in the West End in July comes
Orpheus Descending (1957), not seen in London for almost 20 years. If there’s a line linking them all – and that sums up so much of what draws us to Williams – it’s to be found in the latter: “We’re all of us sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life.”
These are the words of Valentine Xavier – a 30-year-old drifter who arrives in a southern general store and stays long enough to bring about sexual renewal and usher in catastrophe. He is lyre-playing Orpheus, from Greek mythology, transplanted to a then contemporary world of American bigotry, fakery and repression.
Originally conceiving the character in 1940, Williams borrowed an ancient template and created his own archetype. Here stands his beloved rogue male – the epitome of animal magnetism, who runs the risk of sacrificial slaughter for reminding humanity of its vital, wilder part. Marlon Brando (the original Stanley in
A Streetcar Named Desire) played him in
the 1960 film version The Fugitive Kind.
With major revivals of this rarity, the laurels usually go to the leading lady,
taking on the role of storekeeper Lady Torrance. She’s a wretchedly married Italian whose father burned to death years ago in an inferno caused by rednecks outraged by his segregationspurning wine-garden. “Lady” is the Eurydice figure – the wife Orpheus fails to rescue from the underworld – and was played in 1988, to acclaim, by Vanessa Redgrave in the West End, and at the Donmar in 2000 by Helen Mirren.
Hattie Morahan, who triumphed as the trapped Nora in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House at the Young Vic seven years ago, gives a measured, understated performance, both highly watchful and eminently watchable. Yet praise should also be given to the catalyst – or should that be cata-lust? – of her character’s renewal; while avoiding cliché, Seth Numrich lends the lothario an ambivalent sheen of insouciance and wholesomeness.
Could more heat emanate from him? Perhaps. Neither player has quite the star-wattage fully to illuminate the purgatorial gloom of Tamara Harvey’s production, or to save from the odd longueur a text that jolts between exposition and fecund lyricism.
Yet together they forcefully communicate a sense of shared, fleeting awakening. As he presses his fingers on her neck, alleviating tension, Morahan lets a smile play across her lips, eventually arriving at lunging possessiveness. And Numrich grows in stature as she takes him under her wing.
Stoking the oppressive atmosphere are a congregation’s worth of characters jostling for attention, some of them very squeezed. But Jemima Rooper shines as a stylish, wayward vagrant; “This country used to be wild,” she laments, “it’s broken out sick with neon like most other places.” In such nuggets you realise just how much we remain in Williams’s debt.