Artistic director Lucy Bailey celebrates the centenary of Tennessee Williams’ birth with a rare revival of a play, which was called The Seven Descents of Myrtle when it opened on Broadway in 1968. The critics damned it and it closed within a month. It was last seen in London in 1984. In his Memoirs Williams described it as a funny melodrama; the erotic story has its roots in something that happened to him in 1940 when he hitched a ride south from a couple who had just got married.
Lot (Joseph Drake), an effete transvestite, dying from TB, has just wed Myrtle (Fiona Glascott), an ex showgirl and prostitute, in order to thwart his half brother, Chicken (David Sturzaker), a half caste, from getting his property, a lonely, formerly grand, now dilapidated farmhouse in the Mississippi Delta. (Ruth Sutcliffe’s atmospheric set turns it into a slag heap.) Myrtle, frightened out of her wits by Chicken, is only too willing to sign away any rights she might have to the property. The tension comes from wondering when Chicken will rape her, murder her, or whether he will just let her drown in the on coming flood.
Kingdom of Earth, flawed though it is in the second half, is well worth seeing. It has that unmistakable Tennessee Williams overwrought, poetic stamp; so much so, that often it feels like a parody of Tennessee Williams. Lot, “the impotent, one lung cissy,” all skin and bone, and bleached hair, goes to his death, wearing his dead mother’s clothes. His demise would benefit from a bit of the magic realism Blanche DuBois hankered after.
The three actors are excellent. Hopefully, Lucy Bailey’s production will transfer and have a longer shelf life.