"THE KINDNESS OF STRANGERS"

London

"THE KINDNESS OF STRANGERS"

Three plays by Tennessee Williams:

This Property Is Condemned (1941)
A Perfect Analysis Given by a Parrot (1958)
The Lady of Larkspur Lotion (1939)

Tagus Theatre Company at The Greenwich Playhouse To 18 August 2002
Tue-Sat 7.45pm Sun 4pm
Runs 1hr No interval

TICKETS 020 8858 9256
Review Timothy Ramsden 4 August

Not the show as originally intended, but still a powerful hour's worth of Williams.Apparently The Kindness of Strangers linked Tennessee Williams' life and works, using extracts from the major plays and his diaries. However, the playwright's British agents refused permission for his words to be used other than as published.

Not that actor-compiler Jonathan Weightman rocked any foundations of the Williams reputation: the agents refused even to read his script. It's wise, of course, to ensure you have necessary permissions before publicising your show. It seems too that, whoever you are, you can never rely on the kindness of agents.

Instead, Tagus Theatre present three short Williams plays, presumably part of the proposed Kindness. Played in the order given here, they illuminate the great journey into loss and self-deception he achieved through the character of Blanche Dubois in A Streetcar Named Desire.

Tagus' accomplished performers play various southern USA beaux and belles on a slippery descent to madness and despair. In Property the last member of a southern household lives on in their condemned house, wearing her big sister's dress, living off trash-can scraps. Her unbalanced mind's expressed in repeated attempts to walk along the edge of the railroad, trains thundering past as she goes nowhere.

This was no great house: its family slept around or suddenly disappeared. It's the rancid underbelly of Gone with the Wind, hinting at Blanche, with her dependency on the kindness of strangers - the mind-rotted, cash-trash creature Williams transmuted into one of 20th century theatre's great tragic characters.

The Southern dream takes a louder knock in Parrot. Two women, camp followers at the city's annual convention drink their last coins away, one laughing at the other's final scrap of self-respect, a cracker-barrel character assessment picked by a sideshow parrot out of a tub.

Larkspur drains the dregs. Money's run out, even to pay for a bed in a cockroach-infested rooming-house; the title lotion is the cheap way to alcoholic consolation. Weightman's writer comforts Booth's lodger; his own dream world revealed less by our learning his novel's non-existent than in the moment he introduces himself as Anton Chekhov.

Keith Esher Davis's controlled production gives full value to these minor gems, helped by a trio of sympathetic performances.

Tom/Waiter/Writer: Jonathan Weightman
Willie/Bessie/Mrs Hardcastle-Moore: Amanda Booth
Flora/Mrs Wire: Celia Williams

Director: Keith Esher Davis

2002-08-06 09:45:04