Tennessee Williams’ semi-autobiographical dreamlike play, written in his familiar high feverish style, feels, at times, like a pastiche of a Tennessee Williams melo¬drama. He began it in 1938 when he was 28 but he did not complete it until 40 years later. It’s a memory play, poetic and eloquent, vulgar and comic, lurid and squalid; obsessed with death, it offers a series of haunting and elegiac episodes. Not seen in London since 1978, it is well worth reviving; there is a galaxy of good roles to act.
The setting is a seedy, dank, cockroach-infested boarding house in the French quarter of New Orleans. The landlady (Nancy Crane) is a monster, who is going out of her mind. The residents are Williams’ usual round of suspects: the lonely and the lost, the humiliated and the destitute, all “failing to negotiate a truce with life” and doomed to despair.
The leading character is a poor, lonely writer (Tom Ross-Williams), a confused young man, who discovers his homosexuality and begins a lifetime of corruption. He acts as narrator. “There is,” he says, “so much loneliness in the house you can hear it.” In the room next to him is a consumptive, rapacious painter (David Whitworth), coughing blood, who refuses to admit he is sick. He is liable to drop in on the writer and give him a helping hand. A faded, genteel southern belle (a prototype Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire) is dying of leukemia. “I am a yellow cab girl,” she says, “with limousine aspirations.” Her boy friend, a hustler, works in a strip club. There are two pathetic genteel old ladies who are starving and scavenge rubbish bins for food. There is also a black nurse to look after the landlady and a gay photographer who has orgies in the basement.