It attracts Rebecca Frecknall the fascination of Tennessee Williams. Over the past six years, he has systematically read plays, rehearsing audiences at the Almeida, making a dramatic set. In 2018, he directed the revealing revelation, an interpretation of little known, stripped Summer and smoke. Five years later, she took the stage with the production A Streetcar Named Demandfired up by the dynamic cast of Patsy Ferran and Paul Mescal. In the armory A cat on a hot lead roofFrecknall cast Daisy Edgar-Jones, Mescal’s co-star on TV. Normal Peopleas Maggie, a white and frustrated woman who describes herself as a “cat”, infuses the evening with her usual mixture of drama and dreams.
“Lie” is the word that rings throughout the evening. But it is wrong to say that fibers alone are the subject of William. True, the plot is the concealment of the text – and where better to explore this than the theater, which is believable. An old man is not said to die of cancer; a son cannot admit love for another; wives conceal the knowledge of their husbands’ contempt. Still, the main force of the drama comes from exploring the impulse behind the lie.
Against the inexcusable glory of God Chloe LamfordHe takes the advice of the gilded tiles, keeping everyone safe. Kingsley Ben-Adir is especially powerful – sad and sleepy, moving as if he’s dragging dead weight – as Bricks, a drunkard who rejects his wife and hides his feelings; while Williams was writing the story in 1954, he was experiencing “a kind of isolation from my mind” and was increasingly addicted to “a little bit of gossip”. Margarita Chanda is absolutely right as the greedy daughter-in-law. Edgar-Jones – skillfully and boldly – faithfully pulls off the terrible feat of the first act, whose scorn does not stop at her almost entirely malevolent husband, although her image can take another turn from the suggestion that some fury has escaped her. prayer against the will
Although Maggie is the one who calls herself a cat, all the characters could apply the title (which Williams took from her father’s expression). Almost everyone – including the silent, piano-playing spectator who is probably Brick’s lost, beloved friend – takes turns at the cat stretched out on top of the piano. The slow dance movement is another regular feature of Frecknall’s productions; its wooziness chimes with the way characters swim in and out of full consciousness. In the end, it’s not just Williams’s fluency that makes his stories so extraordinary: they cook unhappily and silently.
Director Lyndsey Turner has often announced her interpretation with a huge visual appeal. Who can forget the gray cage of Irish rain that enclosed its production Trust the doctor? However, scenes of bravery begin as bullying. In September, Turner played a Coriolanus at the National in which Shakespeare’s monumental spectacle overwhelmed him. In foxesinstituted by Lizzie Clachan fights with the story of Lillian Hellman.
Set in Alabama in 1900, it was first seen with Tallulah Bankhead on Broadway in 1939 and later filmed with Bette Davis. The ethos may last, but the presentation of characters and attitudes change over time. Stupid people shake themselves shamefully. Women fight to swim. An aristocratic wife, languidly slapped here, driven to drink and spur: Anne Madeley, one of the acting geniuses they had done. Everything big and small she develops an alluring, unnerving conviction. Anne-Marie Duff, never boring, shows her ability to turn in a second from looking like a weapon to seeming completely obsessed. Here – all scarlet – even brought a wonderful Bette D, shoulders and tilt of the head.
It is disturbing that, although there is no adaptation of the dialogue, which refers to the team and the post-Civil War arrangements, Clachan’s design – beige, fringed – evokes the mid-20th century. It’s going to be nothing and nothing. Put between this, with a melodramatic illumination Lucy CarterHellman’s story appears to be histrionic. As if the little foxes were the wolves.
Simon Russell Beale is the reason to see the revival of Tom Stoppard’s 1997 play The discovery of love. He is 77-year-old AE Housman, now dead, looking back on his life divided, when he is carried across the Styx by Alan Williams’ impressive Charon (“I had Dionysus on my back in my boat,” he says – joke noted Shakespeare in love). Bealus looks around, as if he has a finger in the next life. He flits from humor to melancholy with an almost imperceptible movement: he seems to be carried around by his internal laughter.
The story itself, though straightforward Blanche McIntyrea classicist herself, she withers largely on the scene. The surrounding ideas float without impact: Housman the poet versus Housman the Latin scholar; love as a subject of academic study versus love as a weapon for Housman, happy in the heart of the heterosexual Moses Jackson (Ben Lloyd-Hughes has a lot to do in the shorts); the love that seeks to create a new style – Dickie Beau is Oscar Wilde’s delicacy – is also a source of discovery. Far too much is given to the dialogue of celebrity mimes: dropping epithets, hitting croquet balls, chortling.
Star rating (out of five)
A cat on a hot lead roof ★★★★
foxes ★★★
The discovery of love ★★