SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER by Tennessee Williams. Glasgow Citizens.

Glasgow

SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER
by Tennessee Williams

Citizens' Circle Studio To 22 December 2001
Runs 1hr 15min No interval

TICKETS 0141 429 0022
Review Timothy Ramsden 21 December

Smash-hit right between the eyes in powerful Tennessee Williams revival.Turn up the temperature; Tennessee Williams' drama is on a par with the hothouse scene that has Humphrey Bogart sweating it out at the opening of Howard Hawks' film The Big Sleep.

In the play, as in Hawks' film, it's the emotional thermometer that really makes the mercury reach for the sky. And unlike Bogey, we never get a chance to chill out. The pressure's up high throughout this long one-acter. Ellen Sheean, with the tight-muscled features of an anger-driven dowager, steers her wheelchair as if it's fuelled with rage and revenge against Catharine, her daughter-in-law. What's at stake is her dead son's reputation. And more – Sheean and director Philip Prowse make clear it's not just what outsiders might say. They don't have her obsessive family passion. It's her own image of the golden dead boy she can't bear to have tarnished.

Buttoned-up to the hell-fire she seethes at her son's young widow, Sheean is a black-clad death-figure demanding Aleksander Mikic's doctor lobotomise Catharine, who meanwhile has been placed in the custody of a convent. Lobotomy was the brain-gouging operation with the deadening effects Williams witnessed in his own sister and grafted as sub-textual backdrop to Laura Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie.

But Suddenly expresses his horror with maximum impact, intensified when Patti Clare's finely-judged Catharine tells the awful truth about her relationship, determination pushing at the limits of her emotional fragility. Sheean's Mrs Venable has the power of money to cower her in-laws, but the threat she represents hardly outweighs the force that sounds her vulnerable core: the truth that she, an all-American matriarch, was used by her son, along with the other women in his life, to pimp for him in searching out golden boys of his own.

Sheean's coiled spider and Clare's white-flowered butterfly dominate the short, intense evening though Anne Myatt is suitably subdued by financial need, Anne Marie Timoney easily takes the convent Nurse's occasional interventions under her wing and after a neutral presence throughout, Mikic's Doctor calmly delivers the curtain line knockout to Mrs Venable.

Prowse himself is such an influential designer it would be easy to miss the statement made by his set. It's a clinical space in the round over-hung by hothouse plant-life and an ever-accessible Venus Flytrap. His direction shows a merciless understanding of Williams' script.

Doctor Cukrowicz: Aleksander Mikic
Mrs Venable: Ellen Sheean
Catharine: Patti Clare
Sister Felicity: Anne Marie Timoney
Mrs Holly: Anne Myatt
George: Carsten Hayes

Director/Designer: Philip Prowse
Lighting: Gerry Jenkinson

2002-01-22 00:32:34