“… the richness in each play leaves the audience sated.”
Julia Newbould
4 Stars
Venue: Old Fitz
Sydney
Dates: Until August15th
A fresh look at Tennessee Williams with three little known plays
It’s more than 70 years since Tennessee Williams wrote the last of this trio of short stories, but good writing stands the test of time, and Tennessee Williams does write well.
At Liberty; Auto-da-fe; and This Property Is Condemned were all unknown works to me, but the writing and the themes are very typical of Williams.
Director Megan Williams says the playwrights speak to those who feel trapped, suffocated, and forgotten as the world around them shifts and changes. Although decades have passed since Williams wrote these plays, in many ways we can empathise with the characters as our own world has changed so rapidly in recent times.
This production, presented by Ground Floor Theatre Company, is only 50 minutes long but the richness in each play leaves the audience sated.
Three actors spread themselves across six characters in the trio of plays .
At Liberty sees Gloria (Helena Cielak) portraying a 32-year-old would be ingenue, whose dancing skills which were to have taken her onto the stage have been reduced to picking up men at a local hotel. Her mother (Emma Wright) is set on telling her the truth about her situation while Gloria remains in denial. Gloria is stricken with lung disease and she is likely not long for the world. It is the romantic/operatic way for heroines to die, and is a motif that Williams carries through this trio of plays and beyond.
Cielak is perfect as Gloria; she has pathos, spirit, and a great command of the American southern accent. Wright is also excellent in her mother role, which is almost the foil to Gloria’s drama and fragility.
Meg Anderson has excelled in the costume department with perfectly chosen attire for the 40s American south – from delicate tea dresses and satin dressing gowns to the headscarf, furs, and linen suiting.
Auto-da-fe, defined as the act of burning a heretic during the Spanish Inquisition, is a perfect title to the Christian fundamentalist character of Elio (Will Manton). Elio is intent on fire to cleanse the part of town he and his mother Madame Duvenet (Emma Wright) inhabit. Manton is strong in this part and it is he, in this play, with a respiratory issue, in this instance asthma. Wright is able to show more passion in this role, although her restraint in At Liberty is quite powerful.
The story here is that Elio, working at the post office, has come across a lewd photograph sent by a 19-year-old university student to an antique dealer. Elio’s disgust and reaction to the photo are extreme, and it is assumed it is probably homosexual. This is clearly at odds with how he perceives himself, and this internal conflict is destined to result in tragedy.
In This Property Is Condemned, Manton and Cielak play children Tom and Willie. Willie is a scruffy pre-teen who is playing on the railway tracks when she comes across Tom, who is skipping school to fly his kite. His plans are thwarted by the still wind and so he follows Willie who tells him she has given up on school because the teacher had started teaching algebra and she had no interest in finding x. Willie’s sister Alva, who looms large in her life, has recently died of lung disease, and she is slowly moving into her life – not quite aware of what that is.
Both Manton and Cielak are transformed in this play from the characters they inhabit in the earlier ones. Cielak brings her musical training to the role with clear and sweet singing that belies her dirty, neglected character.
Manton especially is almost unrecognisable in the way he is able to inhabit this character – young and loose – such a contrast from the rigid and uptight fundamentalist in Auto-da-fe.
For me these two young characters were the most intriguing of all three plays. There was something that lingered about them long after the curtain came down.
This short play is perhaps the best known of the trio, as it was developed into a movie of the same name starring Natalie Wood and Robert Redford in 1966.
Three plays – four stars
photos by Robert Miniter
Julia Newbould, Theatre Now
