Theatre: The Night of the Iguana
Noël Coward Theatre, London WC2 (0844-482 5151). Until 28 September Running time: 3hrs 15mins ★★★
Tennessee Williams is known as “the poet laureate of lost souls”, said Matt Trueman in Variety. But even by his standards, the restless misfits who populate this “quietly heartbreaking” 1961 play are a mighty long way from salvation. The setting is a ramshackle hotel in Mexico in 1940, and the central trio of characters are “earthy” Maxine, the hotel’s newly widowed owner; Shannon, a defrocked minister turned tour guide, who is “on the run from himself”; and Hannah, an “ethereal” Nantucket artist, travelling with her 97-year-old poet grandfather and bartering their art for places to stay. “The heat’s heavy, the air thick with mosquitoes”, and none of them can find peace.
The play is not vintage Williams, said Sarah Hemming in the FT; it’s “too baggy and too overwrought”. But in the “rolling powerplay between this group of misfits, the dramatist locates a kind of grace”. James Macdonald’s “mesmerising”, beautifully-acted production revels in both the play’s “dry wit and its lugubrious excess”. Clive Owen excels as Shannon, taking you “right inside both the sensitive and the farcical sides” of his “spooked crackup”, said Paul Taylor in The Independent. Anna Gunn gives an “intelligent, stereotype-tweaking” performance as Maxine. And the “superlative” Lia Williams plays Hannah with a “luminous, challenging patience and dry humour”. The result is a “magnificently modulated” production that’s “sometimes achingly funny, sometimes, well, aching. This is a wonderful evening.”
I can’t agree, said Dominic Maxwell in The Times. It’s not that Owen gives a “bad performance exactly – it might be more interesting if he did – but he gives a characteristically contained one”. There’s a “thin line between brooding and boring”, and in this instance he “steps the wrong side of it”. This is not an actor to “exult in lyricism or revel in chaos. Instead, everything gets squashed into his fuzzily frazzled midrange.” As a result, the production remains “becalmed” where it should pulsate, said Susannah Clapp in The Observer. True, there is a rousingly believable storm at one point, but “no one wants audiences to leave a theatre chiefly impressed by good rain”.