VIEUX CARRE. To 11 November.
Manchester
VIEUX CARRE
by Tennessee Williams
Library Theatre To 11 November 2006
Mon-Thu 7.30pm Fri-Sat 8pm Mat 28 Oct, 2, 4, 9, 11 Nov 3pm
Audio-described 4 Nov 3pm, 9 Nov 7.30pm
BSL Signed 2 Nov 7.30pm
Captioned 1 Nov
Pre-show Talk 26 Oct, 11 Nov 3pm
Runs 2hr 55min One interval
TICKETS: 0161 236 7110
www.librarytheatre.com
Review: Timothy Ramsden 16 October
Tennessee in New Orleans with a measure of success.
It’s no surprise in 2006 to be told New Orleans lies below sea-level, but Tennessee Williams’ 1977 play concerns itself with the submerged lives of roomers in Mrs Wire’s lodging-house. It’s a downmarket establishment with the landlady sleeping in the hallway to keep an eye on lodgers. These move in and out of the shadows as in a life-long dream; a dream that’s a nightmare when it comes to the author’s homosexuality.
Denunciation and death face gays, most cruelly with Robert Demeger’s aging Nightingale, desperately self-diagnosing his cough away from the inevitably fatal pneumonia.
Set in 1938/9, the play has in its background fading, failing southern belles, as well as Tye, a creature of the night whose hostile heterosexuality attacks the Writer while sparing plenty of bullying for Jane, the woman who seems to have floated into his grasp and lacks the strength to get clear.
Manchester‘s Library Theatre frequently does fine work with its limited stage resources. Here, designer Sarah Williamson builds over a split-height set of stepped rostra the sense of an old house stretching into its depths through a few ornate window- and door-frames, silvered with a seedy romanticism by Nick Richings’ moody patchworks of light. It’s a tiny miracle of staging.
But Williams needs a careful balance between the dreamlike and the mundane to succeed; especially in works like these which don’t have a focus on one or two characters’ strong stories. Otherwise they can either fly away into unsubstantiality or clump thuddingly to earth. Roger Haines’s production goes some way towards this balance – there’s the light colouring-in of the fantasy-like, reduced circumstance Maude and Carrie, while the sickening Nightingale’s real as can be.
Ruth Gibson’s Jane is a fine centre, carrying on with life, too fatigued to make a major break. There are other good performances. Overall, though, this comes over, in a theatre a stone’s-throw from Manchester’s old Gaiety, where modern repertory had its birth, as something like a Williams version of a Lancashire comedy: not Lancashire, depressively non-comic and not at all bad. But slightly too balanced from the play’s dreamlike incarnations.
The Writer: Mark Arends
Mrs Wire: Frances Jeater
Nursie: Yvonne Brewster
Jane: Ruth Gibson
Nightingale: Robert Demeger
Mary Maude/Tourist: Gillian Axtell
Miss Carrie/Angel/Tourist: Marianne Morley
Tye: Nathan Nolan
Photographer/Pickup/Intern: Christopher Hollinshead
Sky/Patrolman/Intern: Nicholas Osmond
Director: Roger Haines
Designer: Sarah Williamson
Lighting: Nick Richings
Sound: Paul Gregory
Composer: Richard Taylor
Dialect coach: Jan Haydn Rowles
Assistant director: Jeffrey Caffrey
Assistant designer: Ralph Hinton
2006-10-23 12:07:41