Peter Viney's Blog

Sweet Bird of Youth
By Tennessee Williams

Directed by Jonathan Kent
Designed by Anthony Ward
Music by Debbie Wiseman

Chichester Festival Theatre
Monday 12th June 2017, 19.30  

CAST

Marcia Gay Harden – Alexandra del Largo
Brian J. Smith – Chance Wayne
with
Emma Amos – Miss Lucy
Hester Arden – Edna
Matthew Barker – Scudder
Victoria Bewick – Heavenly Finley
Alex Bhatt – Stuff
Ray Emmet Brown – Fly
Graham Butler – Tom Finley Jnr.
Richard Cordery – Boss Finley
Ingrid Craig – Aunt Nonnie
Joy Cruickshank – Violet
Tim Frances – Hatcher
Kurt Kansley – Jackie (pianist)
Rob Ostiere – Bud
Sam Phillips – Scotty
Daniel Tuite – The heckler
Ewart James Walters – Charles

I was surprised to see this described as a lesser-known Tennessee Williams play, because it’s one of the first ones I’d think of. But that’s just me.  I did my research thesis on Hollywood & The Novel and spent some time considering whether to include playwrights who had worked in Hollywood, or written about Hollywood or simply about film stars of the Golden Age (as here). Sweet Bird of Youth qualified, and Tennessee Williams was writing for MGM just before his career took off.  Subsequently, Williams also had more of his stage work adapted for film  than any of his contemporaries. I’ve also stood and gazed at the house he was brought up in, which is in Clarkesdale, Mississippi, the absolute centre of the Delta Blues.

Sweet Bird of Youth is a later play, and dates from 1959.  This production has two real American movie actors.

A reluctant Chance (Brian J. Smith) is instructed to get on with it by Alexandra (Marcia Gay Harden).

The story takes place in 1956. Ageing Hollywood star Alexandra del Largo (Marcia Gay Harden) has retreated, drunk and on drugs, to St. Cloud, a small town on the Gulf Coast, after her come-back movie had a disastrous premier. She’s accompanied by a young hustler she’s picked up, Chance Wayne (Brian J. Smith), whose hometown is St Cloud. He was a beach boy at a hotel in Palm Beach. Chance has chosen their destination, at the Royal Palms Hotel, because he wants to look up his old girlfriend, Heavenly, daughter of the local politician. What he doesn’t know is that she is sterile as a result of a nasty dose of VD he gave her before he left, and her family is not happy about it. He tries to blackmail Alexandra, who is posing as The Princess Kosmonopolis to hide her identity. It’s not safe for him to be in town, as Boss Finley, and his son, Tom Finley Jnr are out to get him. In a fiercely political theme for 1959, a random black male has been taken off the street and castrated. The racist Boss Finley is to address a rally to justify that … but also says that Chance can expect the same fate. At the end, it turns out that Alexandra’s movie is a box office smash. Chance decides to wait and face his fate.

Chichester’s Festival Theatre is a massive semi-circular stage, and while this has a large cast, much of the focus is on just the two lead actors for the first hour.  They can’t play it right at the front either, because people at the sides don’t want to look at their side views. It’s just like last week at the Old Vic, with the size of the stage clashing with an intimate play … how many times have I said that this year? We were right at the front, slightly to the favoured side where the bed was, so not personally inconvenienced by the expanses of stage, but the play would work better in a smaller venue. Nevertheless, the set and the lighting plot are superb.

The play is unbalanced in its composition, growing out of a one-act piece, The Enemy: Time. The “two parter” impression is greatly increased because it’s not so much two actors interacting on stage, but for long periods just one is doing a monologue and the other reacting, or in the case of Chance’s long act one monologue, stitting ignoring him and doing make up.

Heavenly Finley (Victoria Bewick) and Boss Finley (Richard Cordery)

After the long, mainly two-parter bedroom scene, we switch and meet Boss Finley, but that seems to be a two parter with his son, followed by a two parter with his daughter, who he wants dressed in white beside him on the podium “like a virgin,” a phrase he repeats twice, making me wonder if Madonna ever saw the Eli Kazan 1962 film. Richard Cordery looks right for a Good Ol’ Boy Southern politician, and does the part of Boss Finley with considerable gusto.

Chance in the bar in Act Two

Act two is much livelier than act one. Partly because we get more characters on stage as we move to the bar in the hotel lobby. Mainly because Brian J.Smith gives such a truly magnificent performance as Chance. It’s an American acting style. When you think of Williams, you think of Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire. You think of The Method, stumbling through a role ridden with angst. Smith does it so very well. In Act 2, Chance is popping Alexandra’s little pink pills washed down with vodka in the bar. He’s had a joint upstairs. He’s stoned, drunk, hyper. He can’t understand what he did to Heavenly, nor why everyone loathes him.  Face it, he’s thick, as well as self-obsessed. His ridiculous ambition to be a movie star, his fantasy world, comes out in his conversation with the sympathetic Aunt Nonnie (Ingrid Craig). She had looked the other way when he bribed a Pullman conductor so as to screw the 15 year old Heavenly in a vacant railway compartment. She knows about the drama festival where he fantasises he came second.

Tom Jnr (Graham Butler) confronts Chance

Then we get Tom Jnr (Graham Butler) the furious, weasely brother of Heavenly confronting Chance.  Butler gives us flat out anger. Superb performance. You get the blowsy Miss Lucy (Emma Amos), Boss Findley’s long time mistress, who’s inclined to write disparaging remarks about the Boss in lipstick on the ladies room mirror. There’s a scene where The Hillbilly Heckler, a character who follows Boss Findley around, is horribly beaten up by Tom Jnr and his buddies.  There are no small parts is the mantra, and the barman here, Stuff (Alex Bhatt), proved that, as a constant listening presence with his mighty quiff and absurd mauve uniform with gold epaulettes (designed by Chance when he worked that bar). I was often bored in Act One, but never at all in Act Two. I guess by 1959, Williams role in American theatre was too lofty for editorial advice. 10-15 minutes taken out of Act One would improve the play enormously. There’s simply too much repetition of the same points. OK, she’s old, over the hill. He’s on the make. We got that very quickly. Reiteration becomes dull.

Chance and Alexandra smoke a joint. He is recording her incriminating conversation.

After years of complaining about gratuitous smoking on stage, a contrary comment. A major plot hinge is that Chance, knowing that Alexandra has both pills and hashish, sets out to clumsily blackmail her so that she will launch him and Heavenly as film stars. Yes, Chance is definitely dumb. She produces the hash, and he gets her to talk about importing it … Florida had, and still has, swingeing drug laws … up to 30 years. So he has to roll a joint. Being at the front we saw this well. He then puts it in the pouch so as to switch for an electronic version. That happens twice. Both are odourless and smokeless. It used to be that Health & Heather’s Herbal Smoking Mixture was used on stage in the period between heavy stage smoking and electronic vapour. I saw it used particularly well for dope smoking on stage a few times … it smells vile, like a pungent wet bonfire, and not at all like tobacco. With a white tube, no vapour, and no smell, you think they might as well just mime it with a candy cigarette or tube of paper.

I wonder why British theatres continue to do American classics, when the rules mean they’re done with mainly British casts. At least both leads here were Americans. But most of the others, good as they were, drift on a word here or a word there. It’s OK, but I spent so many years answering criticism of audio recordings we did with American actors in London, that I’m hyper-sensitive. According to many Americans, leave an actor in London for a few weeks and his American either gets Britishisms added, or becomes exaggerated. I noticed that Brian J. Smith’s Southern was much less marked than the others … I suspect more realistic rather than “Stage Dixie.”  Both leads feel real.

The main criticism is that it is a melodramatic play, and in the late 1950s, Tennessee Williams was criticized for the violence and titillation in his plays, but Williams himself described them as “cornpone melodrama.” The fading Alexandra is a Williams stock figure, Chance is another favoured image, as Alexandra’s attempt to make human contact, but through a failed personality. It’s Tennessee Williams, and according to most, lesser Tennessee Williams. It is a very definite style.

I’ll go along with the crowd and say 3 stars, although at the interval I was going for two. I thought Act Two was four.

I was worried earlier this year that my edge was going as there was a run of 4 and 5 star reviews from me. Now I’ve had a longish run of 2s and 3s.

***

WHAT THE CRITICS SAID:
4
David Jays, Sunday Times. ****
3
Michael Billington, The Guardian ***
Domenic Cavendish, The Telegraph ***
Quentin Lets, Daily Mail, ***
Bella Todd, What’s On Stage, ***

JONATHAN KENT
Young Chekhov Season (Platanov, Ivanov, The Seagull) – Chichester
Gypsy by Arthur Laurents / Stephen Sondheim, Chichester Festival Theatre

GRAHAM BUTLER
Nell Gwynn, by Jessica Swale, The Globe (John Dryden)
Richard II, The Globe (Aumerie)
Henry VI: Three Plays. Globe on tour, (Henry VI)