The UK première of a play by
Tennessee Williams ought to be an attention-grabber, but
The Pink Bedroom is not in any
meaningful sense a play. By my watch, it clocked in at twelve minutes,
in a bill with three other pieces which only exceeded an hour in total
because of time taken to re-set the stage between offerings. One of the
others,
Mister Paradise,
received its own première only last year in the
Lovely And Misfit package at
Trafalgar Studios, but that also contained a piece which was of
significance in terms both of writing and of playing duration. This is,
well, not.
In
The Lady Of Larkspur Lotion
(written
c. 1941), two
penniless tenants of a New Orleans rooming-house endure their
landlady’s scorn and cling to their respective fabrications about their
lives. In
Mister Paradise
(1939), a young woman hunts down a neglected poet only to find the
reality is a shadow of a man who knows he does not deserve recognition.
In
Talk To Me Like The Rain And Let
Me Listen (1953), a doomed couple swap fatalistic monologues:
his about last night, hers about her solitary future. And in
The Pink Bedroom (1935ish), a
mistress breaks with the feckless man who has set her up in the salmon
boudoir in question. In some ways this last is the most realised of the
lot, in that it feels (with its semi-comical payoff) as if it were
composed complete in itself as a sketch rather than written as a mere
exercise, or a draft or fragment to be perhaps worked up into something
more major later on.
Unspoken Productions frequently rely on “the Method”; this I discovered
by Googling rather than from the programme, which offers no information
about either the company or the plays, not even a running order. Brian
Timoney fully inhabits his character, Lee Strasberg-style, in
Talk To Me Like The Rain, but I
gained no such impression from any of the other seven players he
directs here. Method motivation is sometimes less important than
accuracy or consistency of accent or non-gabbling diction. When
Williams said, “The peak of my virtuosity was in the one-act plays”, it
is impossible to believe that he had any of these in mind.
Written for the Financial
Times.