Paul Newman’s recent death prompted a welter of obituaries that praised this most un-Hollywood of Hollywood stars for not exploiting his undeniable beauty. Like Brando, Dean and other generational peers, he was a serious actor first, a pretty-boy pin-up barely at all if he could help it. Newman can be seen onscreen next week in one of his defining early roles, as emotionally tormented ex-football player Brick in the 1958 adaptation of Tennessee Williams’ play, Cat On A Hot Tin Roof. This wasn’t Newman’s only dalliance with Williams’ work. Four years later he took the lead in the film of Sweet Bird Of Youth, which also shows at The GFT, and in 1987 directed his life-long partner Joanne Woodward in a version of The Glass Menagerie.
It’s fitting, then, that as part of The Tennessee Williams Festival, which makes up the heart of Glasgay! 2008, the screening of Cat On A Hot Tin Roof is dedicated to Newman. As with the Glasgay theatre programme, though, it’s Williams’ lesser-known works that intrigue the most. Because, for every Cat On A Hot Tin Roof and other staples which have subverted the mainstream of twentieth century American drama, there are umpteen short plays and a host of later works dismissed when they were first written as the addled ramblings of a drug-addicted neurotic. Take Blood Kin, Sidney Lumet’s Gore Vidal-scripted 1970 take on Williams’ The Seven Descents Of Myrtle. The word camp doesn’t even come close. This major programme of stage and screen work allows this plethora of neglected gems to be re-assessed alongside a brand new reimagining of Williams’ own fantastical life of incident and colour.
This comes in Elysian Fields, written and directed by Derek McLuckie, who locks a wacked out Williams in a hospital ward with a similarly crazed Vivien Leigh, who’d played Blanche DuBois both onstage and opposite Marlon Brando in Elia Kazan’s 1951 film of the play.
“Vivien Leigh blamed Tennessee Williams and Blanche DuBois for her own descent into madness,” McLuckie explains, “so I have them meet in this surrealistic hell-realm, which attempts to get into Williams’ psyche. His later works were post-modern before their time, and were critically lambasted, which goes some way to explaining why they’ve been so neglected.”
Few have done more to put Williams’ lesser-known works out into the open than Andy Arnold, first as director of The Arches, now at The Tron. Arnold directs Suddenly, Last Summer, first performed in 1958, and most recently seen in Scotland in a touring production starring Diana Rigg. Arnold has also fleshed out his programme with both a curtain-raiser and a trio of shorts performed immediately following the centrepiece.
A Perfect Analysis Given By A Parrot, also dating from 1958, is the sort of discovery Arnold specialised in at The Arches. Like The Rain, a compendium of three plays, Hello From Bertha, This Property Is Condemned and Talk To Me Like The Rain And Let Me Listen, continues in this spirit. The latter play alone, in which a worn out couple’s litanies of despair are laid bare in a cheap hotel room, is arguably the most heartbreaking eight pages of drama ever written.
In 2004, Arnold presented a similar trilogy collected under the banner, Caged Heat. This featured Moony’s Kid Don’t Cry, 27 Wagons Full Of Cotton and Something Unspoken (featuring incidentally, a cast that included both Grant Smeaton and Pauline Goldsmith, who appear in Elysian Fields), and followed the success of another vignette, Lord Byron’s Love Letter.
“The short plays are Williams trying out ideas,” Arnold observes. “27 Wagons Full Of Cotton was a short story first, then a twenty minute play, then a film. For me, the play is the best of the lot. Williams was way ahead of his time, and for all his plays are about people in desperate situations wanting to escape, he’s a beautiful craftsman.”
Recent productions of The Glass Menagerie in Edinburgh, Baby Doll at the Citizens, Sweet Bird Of Youth in Dundee, where David Tennant starred in a 1996 look at the Glass Menagerie, and Cat on A Hot Tin Roof (most notably in a late 1980s touring production starring Ian Charleson and Lindsay Duncan) and A Streetcar Named Desire pretty much everywhere testify to this.
At The Citizens, Philip Prowse directed a slew of productions over twenty years, from Camino Real in 1974 to his 1997 production of Cat On A Hot Tin Roof. Inbetween came Sweet Bird Of Youth in 1992, The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore in 1994 and In The Bar Of A Tokyo Hotel in 1996. Most memorable of these was The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore, which brought Rupert Everett back to his alma mater to drag up as faded glamour-puss Flora Goforth alongside Greg Hicks, Georgina Hale and Sophie Ward. In 1968, Joseph Losey cast Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton and, bizarrely, Noel Coward as The Witch Of Capri, in a work he transformed into the little known Boom!, which also features in The GFT’s Williams season. A year later, The Milk Train was one of the first productions to be presented at the Citizens by its brand new artistic director, Giles Havergal.
In Glasgay, a new generation of directors have grasped the opportunity to present some of Williams’ more explicit works. And Tell Sad Stories Of The Deaths Of Queens was written in 1959, but, as the title of a play abut a gay transvestite and a sailor in the New Orleans Mardi Gras suggests, couldn’t be performed in Williams’ lifetime. The play has only been produced at all in the last couple of years, and Sam Rowe’s production marks its Scottish premiere.
“This play is a real opportunity for people to discover another side to Tennessee Williams,” Rowe maintains. “He was criticised for not having a gay rights agenda, but said in a TV interview in 1971 that he’d written this play. It’s just taken a while for people to be ready for it. Obviously there’s a queer dimension to his other work, but here, being outside society exists within queer subculture and a gay psyche.”
More political still are The Municipal Abattoir and The Chalky White Substance, which date from the 1960s and 1980 respectively, although the first piece was only published in 2006. Both, however, are set in some unspecified future, and feature an older man and a younger man attempting to connect in worlds where the female population has been all but wiped out.
“It’s so rare to see anything like this onstage,” according to director Drew Taylor. “It’s not just about sex, but a beautiful love that’s going on, and it’s a real honour to be part of that.”
Moving back to early Williams work is Laurance Rudic, who, despite spending umpteen seasons at the Citizens, only ever appeared in one Williams play, Prowse’s 1974 production of Camino Real. Rudic’s take on The Parade, which Williams wrote aged 29, is rooted in his own spiritual philosophy, which he’s chosen to apply to this play about cross-generational love in a deeply personal fashion.
“I’m using the play as a template for my own creativity and experiences,” Rudic says. “I can’t pretend to know anything about Tennessee Wiliams, but this play is about a love affair that’s unrequited, and is about connections and the way things can happen between people at any time.”
Rudic met Williams briefly in Edinburgh the year before he died. In the flesh, this legendary figure, long since soaked in his own mythology, wasn’t pretty.
“It was very sad,” Rudic recalls today. “He was just this old man who was really out of it. What is it about some artists who have to live this totally self-destructive rock and roll lifestyle?”
Without that self-destructiveness, though, what sort of a writer would Williams have been?
“There’s so much agony in his writing, “ McLuckie points out. “That came from his family and this constant guilt he felt about his sister. All of that explains why he was so dysfunctional, but without that dysfunction, you wouldn’t have these beautiful plays.”
The Tennessee Williams Festival forms part of Glasgay 2008. Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, 14 Oct, 6pm, Sweet Bird Of Youth, 19 Oct, 3pm, Boom!, 28 Oct, 3pm, Blood Kin, 30 Oct, 6pm, all Glasgow Film Theatre. Elysian Fields, The Arches, 14-18 Oct. The Chalky White Substance and The Municipal Abattoir, The Arches, Glasgow, 21-25 Oct. The Parade, Citizens Theatre, Glasgow, 21 Oct-Nov 1. Suddenly Last Summer, preceded by A Perfect Analysis Given By A Parrot, The Tron Theatre, Glasgow, 24 Oct-8 Nov, 7.30pm. Like The Rain: 3 Short Plays, also at The Tron, 28 Oct-8 Nov, 9pm. And Tell Sad Stories Of The Death Of Queens, Citizens Theatre, 28 Oct-1 Nov.
www.glasgay.com
www.gft.org
The Herald, October 11th 2008
ends
It’s fitting, then, that as part of The Tennessee Williams Festival, which makes up the heart of Glasgay! 2008, the screening of Cat On A Hot Tin Roof is dedicated to Newman. As with the Glasgay theatre programme, though, it’s Williams’ lesser-known works that intrigue the most. Because, for every Cat On A Hot Tin Roof and other staples which have subverted the mainstream of twentieth century American drama, there are umpteen short plays and a host of later works dismissed when they were first written as the addled ramblings of a drug-addicted neurotic. Take Blood Kin, Sidney Lumet’s Gore Vidal-scripted 1970 take on Williams’ The Seven Descents Of Myrtle. The word camp doesn’t even come close. This major programme of stage and screen work allows this plethora of neglected gems to be re-assessed alongside a brand new reimagining of Williams’ own fantastical life of incident and colour.
This comes in Elysian Fields, written and directed by Derek McLuckie, who locks a wacked out Williams in a hospital ward with a similarly crazed Vivien Leigh, who’d played Blanche DuBois both onstage and opposite Marlon Brando in Elia Kazan’s 1951 film of the play.
“Vivien Leigh blamed Tennessee Williams and Blanche DuBois for her own descent into madness,” McLuckie explains, “so I have them meet in this surrealistic hell-realm, which attempts to get into Williams’ psyche. His later works were post-modern before their time, and were critically lambasted, which goes some way to explaining why they’ve been so neglected.”
Few have done more to put Williams’ lesser-known works out into the open than Andy Arnold, first as director of The Arches, now at The Tron. Arnold directs Suddenly, Last Summer, first performed in 1958, and most recently seen in Scotland in a touring production starring Diana Rigg. Arnold has also fleshed out his programme with both a curtain-raiser and a trio of shorts performed immediately following the centrepiece.
A Perfect Analysis Given By A Parrot, also dating from 1958, is the sort of discovery Arnold specialised in at The Arches. Like The Rain, a compendium of three plays, Hello From Bertha, This Property Is Condemned and Talk To Me Like The Rain And Let Me Listen, continues in this spirit. The latter play alone, in which a worn out couple’s litanies of despair are laid bare in a cheap hotel room, is arguably the most heartbreaking eight pages of drama ever written.
In 2004, Arnold presented a similar trilogy collected under the banner, Caged Heat. This featured Moony’s Kid Don’t Cry, 27 Wagons Full Of Cotton and Something Unspoken (featuring incidentally, a cast that included both Grant Smeaton and Pauline Goldsmith, who appear in Elysian Fields), and followed the success of another vignette, Lord Byron’s Love Letter.
“The short plays are Williams trying out ideas,” Arnold observes. “27 Wagons Full Of Cotton was a short story first, then a twenty minute play, then a film. For me, the play is the best of the lot. Williams was way ahead of his time, and for all his plays are about people in desperate situations wanting to escape, he’s a beautiful craftsman.”
Recent productions of The Glass Menagerie in Edinburgh, Baby Doll at the Citizens, Sweet Bird Of Youth in Dundee, where David Tennant starred in a 1996 look at the Glass Menagerie, and Cat on A Hot Tin Roof (most notably in a late 1980s touring production starring Ian Charleson and Lindsay Duncan) and A Streetcar Named Desire pretty much everywhere testify to this.
At The Citizens, Philip Prowse directed a slew of productions over twenty years, from Camino Real in 1974 to his 1997 production of Cat On A Hot Tin Roof. Inbetween came Sweet Bird Of Youth in 1992, The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore in 1994 and In The Bar Of A Tokyo Hotel in 1996. Most memorable of these was The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore, which brought Rupert Everett back to his alma mater to drag up as faded glamour-puss Flora Goforth alongside Greg Hicks, Georgina Hale and Sophie Ward. In 1968, Joseph Losey cast Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton and, bizarrely, Noel Coward as The Witch Of Capri, in a work he transformed into the little known Boom!, which also features in The GFT’s Williams season. A year later, The Milk Train was one of the first productions to be presented at the Citizens by its brand new artistic director, Giles Havergal.
In Glasgay, a new generation of directors have grasped the opportunity to present some of Williams’ more explicit works. And Tell Sad Stories Of The Deaths Of Queens was written in 1959, but, as the title of a play abut a gay transvestite and a sailor in the New Orleans Mardi Gras suggests, couldn’t be performed in Williams’ lifetime. The play has only been produced at all in the last couple of years, and Sam Rowe’s production marks its Scottish premiere.
“This play is a real opportunity for people to discover another side to Tennessee Williams,” Rowe maintains. “He was criticised for not having a gay rights agenda, but said in a TV interview in 1971 that he’d written this play. It’s just taken a while for people to be ready for it. Obviously there’s a queer dimension to his other work, but here, being outside society exists within queer subculture and a gay psyche.”
More political still are The Municipal Abattoir and The Chalky White Substance, which date from the 1960s and 1980 respectively, although the first piece was only published in 2006. Both, however, are set in some unspecified future, and feature an older man and a younger man attempting to connect in worlds where the female population has been all but wiped out.
“It’s so rare to see anything like this onstage,” according to director Drew Taylor. “It’s not just about sex, but a beautiful love that’s going on, and it’s a real honour to be part of that.”
Moving back to early Williams work is Laurance Rudic, who, despite spending umpteen seasons at the Citizens, only ever appeared in one Williams play, Prowse’s 1974 production of Camino Real. Rudic’s take on The Parade, which Williams wrote aged 29, is rooted in his own spiritual philosophy, which he’s chosen to apply to this play about cross-generational love in a deeply personal fashion.
“I’m using the play as a template for my own creativity and experiences,” Rudic says. “I can’t pretend to know anything about Tennessee Wiliams, but this play is about a love affair that’s unrequited, and is about connections and the way things can happen between people at any time.”
Rudic met Williams briefly in Edinburgh the year before he died. In the flesh, this legendary figure, long since soaked in his own mythology, wasn’t pretty.
“It was very sad,” Rudic recalls today. “He was just this old man who was really out of it. What is it about some artists who have to live this totally self-destructive rock and roll lifestyle?”
Without that self-destructiveness, though, what sort of a writer would Williams have been?
“There’s so much agony in his writing, “ McLuckie points out. “That came from his family and this constant guilt he felt about his sister. All of that explains why he was so dysfunctional, but without that dysfunction, you wouldn’t have these beautiful plays.”
The Tennessee Williams Festival forms part of Glasgay 2008. Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, 14 Oct, 6pm, Sweet Bird Of Youth, 19 Oct, 3pm, Boom!, 28 Oct, 3pm, Blood Kin, 30 Oct, 6pm, all Glasgow Film Theatre. Elysian Fields, The Arches, 14-18 Oct. The Chalky White Substance and The Municipal Abattoir, The Arches, Glasgow, 21-25 Oct. The Parade, Citizens Theatre, Glasgow, 21 Oct-Nov 1. Suddenly Last Summer, preceded by A Perfect Analysis Given By A Parrot, The Tron Theatre, Glasgow, 24 Oct-8 Nov, 7.30pm. Like The Rain: 3 Short Plays, also at The Tron, 28 Oct-8 Nov, 9pm. And Tell Sad Stories Of The Death Of Queens, Citizens Theatre, 28 Oct-1 Nov.
www.glasgay.com
www.gft.org
The Herald, October 11th 2008
ends
Comments