Tennessee Williams’ A Cavalier for Milady, a one-act play, written two years before he died and never performed before, is revived to celebrate his centenary (1911-1983) and is of interest only because it is by Williams.
A woman, dressed as a child, mentally unstable and over-medicated, is looking at a nude male statue and turning over the pages of an album of pictures of the Russian dancer, Vaslav Nijinsky. Her erotic fantasies come to life. “I want to be touched,” she says, “and be touched.” The apparition refuses but is quite willing to have a chat and dance excerpts from L’Apres Midi d’Un Faune for her. Meanwhile, her mother and a female friend, two coarse and raucous society ladies, are in Central Park having sex in the bushes with young male escorts they have hired.
The awful mother, who behaves like a drag queen, is Williams’ portrait of his mother; just as her daughter is a portrait of his sister whom his mother had lobotomised without telling him and whom he never forgave.
Sam Marks’s Faune looks as if he might have stepped out of the well-known photographs of Nijinsky in Leon Bakst’s costume.