Clive Owen turns up the heat
The Night of the Iguana
Noël Coward Theatre
The last time Clive Owen was on the West End stage, it was in the wake of 9/11 and he was funny, moving, frustrated and despairing as Brian, the father of a severely handicapped girl in Peter Nichols’s enduring autobiographical classic A Day in the Death of Joe Egg.
The film world beckoned. But now, a generation on, here he is in the West End again, playing another man in a highly enervated state to tragicomic effect: Reverend T Lawrence Shannon in Tennessee Williams’s relatively rarely sighted The Night of the Iguana
(1961), directed by James Macdonald.
Shannon is an erstwhile minister barred from his church for committing fornication and heresy (“in the same week”); he’s now a tour guide for a bottom-rung tour company. Imagine an American Basil Fawlty, and you won’t be miles off the figure in a crumpled white linen suit who lurches into view at the start of an evening that derives bleak amusement and accumulating melancholia from the sight of those who’ve run out of road.
Owen, 54, remains devilishly handsome (the role was played by Richard Burton in the 1964 film) but compensates for the wholesomeness of his tanned good looks with tellingly trembling drinker’s hands and an aura of incipient breakdown. A panting opening rant reveals that Shannon has left an all-female coachload of Baptists
up a hillside in Mexico and retired, with consummate unprofessionalism, to the veranda of the cheap hotel (run by a recently widowed friend) he has booked, having pocketed the key.
Heedless of the honking bushorn and indignant flapping of the ringleader of his tormentors, Finty Williams’s hilariously flinty Judith, he says he’s suffering from a fever, but it needs no doctor to diagnose an existential crisis, even before he explodes in a pantomimed outbreak of tantrum-ing hysteria.
It’s a crisis that finds its spiritual companion in the wistful, quaint, quiet, passion-starved Hannah Jelkes (Lia Williams) – a spinster loyally tending to her deaf, 97-year-old poet grandfather.
Those seeking high drama must look elsewhere (this isn’t in the same league as A Streetcar Named Desire or Cat on a Hot Tin Roof). Rae Smith’s set strives for monumental impact, yet its staginess feels coerced. The original short story, from 1948, is a much more acute portrait of lonely anguish.
At three hours, it’s sometimes an uphill slog, but the main performances have a persuasive integrity. Anna Gunn is unexpectedly touching as Maxine, the bullish hostess. Lia Williams majors in spellbinding stillness. Her Hannah is meek, observant and discreetly fortitudinous, recounting her sum total of two meagre sexual experiences without begging for sympathy.
When Owen’s raddled man of the cloth gently cups his hand to her face, it’s as if he is attempting to cast a ropebridge across an abyss – this being Williams, there’s no happy ending. A valuable enough excursion into the lesser-known terrain of a master, then; but for the cash-strapped, not worth a huge detour or outlay. Until Sept 28. Tickets: 0844 482 5151; iguanawestend.com