TheatreguideLondon
www.theatreguidelondon.co.uk
The TheatreguideLondon Review
Kingdom of Earth
The Print Room Spring 2011
Tennessee
Williams' play, first and last seen in London in 1984, is not a totally
successful work. But it has a lot of raw energy and emotional truth,
and will hold you through a powerful and engrossing evening.
Williams famously
went into an artistic decline in the 1960s, maintaining his personal
vision and poetic expression but losing control over increasingly
sprawling, disjointed and unfocussed plays, and Kingdom of Earth shows
the signs of this in a repeatedly shifting tone and abrupt changes in
characters.
That it succeeds anyway is a tribute not only to the playwright's inherent talent but to an excellent staging by Lucy Bailey that is in some ways superior to the 1984 production.
(I frequently have
occasion to see first plays by young writers who have not fully
mastered their craft but are clearly real playwrights with real
futures. It is sadly instructive to realise that the work of a real
playwright in the process of losing his craft looks very similar.)
A tubercular and
dying man returns to his family's Mississippi home with a new wife,
motivated in part by the opportunity to deprive his hated half-brother
of the chance to inherit the estate on his death. But brother is
prepared to fight, even - or perhaps especially - if that involves
winning the bride over to his side. Oh, and the river is rising and the
whole house is likely to be underwater soon.
There are clearly
opportunities for comedy in the situation and the clash between effete
aesthete, earthy he-man and flighty bimbo, and the first hour or so of
Williams' script wanders among the realms of Mark Twain, Neil Simon and
Joe Orton before turning more serious as death, flood and life-changing
decisions approach.
Williams' special
genius is apparent in the fact that all three characters find and hold
our sympathy in spite of having been introduced as near-cartoons, and
that each develops a depth and complexity that is believable especially
because it is sometimes self-contradictory.
And this is where
director Bailey and her actors contribute significantly to the
evening's success, as she guides them to find and communicate the
reality beneath the grotesques.
Joseph Drake
displays the new groom in all his vindictiveness, sexual ambiguity and
near-madness, and still invests him with the pathos of a dying man.
David Sturzaker's brother is crude, violent, rawly sexual (Think
Stanley Kowalski intensified several times over) but also a man
fighting for the birthright, in property and happiness, of which he has
unjustly been deprived.
And Fiona Glascott
digs beneath the woman's bubbly surface to layers of both passion and
self-awareness, so that we can never be sure whether her wavering of
loyalties is sincere or looking out for the main chance - or, indeed,
whether there's any difference.
I have only two
criticisms to make of director Bailey - first, that too often she has
the actors race through scenes, not giving the characters time to think
or react; and second, that she allowed Ruth Sutcliffe's misguided stage
design.
Evidently imagining
that the threatened flood has come and gone, Sutcliffe replaced the
called-for interior sets (which have symbolic significance that is lost
here) with a mountain of dirt, so that you spend a good deal of the
evening worrying for the safety of the actors as they gingerly try to
retain their footing while climbing up and down its surface.
Gerald Berkowitz
Return to TheatreguideLondon home page.
Review - Kingdom of Earth - Print Room 2011
