Two productions of plays by one of the founding fathers of twentieth century American drama, Tennessee Williams, are set to hit the West End stage in a couple of months time. Thomas Lanier Williams drafted some of the most haunting plays ever written - plays full of the joy, pain and poetry of life that always touch at the heart of raw human emotion. And he created some of the all-time great theatrical roles for women. The West End has seen high quality reincarnations of some of those great female roles in the last few years with stunning performances by Frances O'Connor in "Cat On A Hot Tin Roof", Victoria Hamilton and Diana Rigg in "Suddenly Last Summer" and Clare Higgins and Jenny Seagrove in "The Night Of The Iguana". In 2007 London audiences will get the chance to see Hollywood star Jessica Lange in "The Glass Menagerie" (which begins previews at the Apollo on January 31) and Zoe Wannamaker in "The Rose Tattoo" (which commences previews at the Olivier on March 19).
Both of these plays examine the relationships between a mother and daughter. Set in St. Louis in the 1930s, "Menagerie" examines the troubled relationship between Amanda Wingfield (created on stage in 1948 by the legendary Helen Hayes) - who Williams described as "a little woman of great but confused vitality clinging frantically to another time and place" - and her crippled daughter, Laura, "a piece of her own glass collection, too exquisitely fragile to move from the shelf". "The Rose Tattoo", a play whose locale is a Sicilian community on the Louisiana Gulf Coast, depicts the story of Serafina, who is both driven and haunted by memories of her dead husband, and her vivacious daughter, Rosa, who is emotionally smothered by the grip of Serafina's mourning. In The National Theatre staging, Zoe Wannamaker will attempt to tread in the footsteps of actresses who have previously given monumental performances in the role of Serafina - Maureen Stapleton, who Williams personally chose to create the character on stage in 1950; Anna Magnani, whose magnificent portrayal earned her an Oscar in the film version of the play; and Rita Moreno, who stunned the Chicago critics in 1968 with a performance that won her the Joseph Jefferson Award as Best Actress.
The two Tennessee Williams classics are also similar in the fact that - in differing ways - they deal with the continual rush of time, a common theme in Williams' writing. "Menagerie" is a "memory play", told through the eyes of the Wingfield son, Tom, an erstwhile poet trapped and torn by his conflicting love for his mother and his sister. "Tattoo", which Williams called his "love play to the world", deals with the impermanence of time and how in the human memory love exists in fragments of truth and self-deception. In both plays Williams establishes a theatrical continuum for his audience that avoids his characters being dwarfed by the destructive world of time. As Williams wrote in his notes for the play, "Snatching the eternal out of the desperately fleeting is the great magic trick of human existence." Soon, with the aid of two great theatrical divas and their accompanying casts, London theatre aficionados will have the chance to share once again in the magic of Williams' pen.
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