Of the three major post-war American playwrights, Tennessee Williams strikes me as the most emotionally rich and rewarding, a master observer of the human condition and poet of the stage. But, despite his influence and legacy, it tends to be The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof that he is best remembered for, and often his supposedly lesser works are left untouched. With the black doris project, director and co-producer James Beaumont has made an effort to revive Williams’ earliest short plays with a talented team of emerging and established actors. 

Williams, quoted in the programme notes, described his one major theme to be the “destructive impact of society on the sensitive, non-comformist individual,” but the more apparent link between these four short plays (besides all being set in the deep south) seems to be the lies we tell ourselves in order to survive. It’s an unapologetically cynical outlook, but not without an uncomfortable sense of humour running underneath — the humour of recognition and truth. [More] 

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We are seated in a long traverse, two rows each side with the stage running the full length of the Basement theatre space. Each end is wallpapered with brown paper, stuck on with drawing pins.  There is a wood-framed glass door at one end and a short worn wooden staircase and balustrade at the other.  A wooden tea chest and a brass single bed with an unconscious occupant grace the centre space in anticipation of the first of four short plays from the Mississippi.

The aesthetics and general mood permeating all four works give me an impression of 1930s depression-era, though it turns out Tennessee Williams wrote them between 1941 and 1942.  There’s little or no mention of such contemporary American matters as the Second World War however; these are acutely insightful journeys into the insular lives of troubled southerners, their struggles as familiar as they are timeless.

Directed by James Beaumont, the excellently-cast cast is a blend of experienced and emerging actors, congruent with the black doris project’s stated objective, along with the aim to work with “great writing …that demands adept craft”: mission accomplished. 

Just a couple of iffy accents and comparatively stiff characterisations have the overall production falling a hair short of theatrical perfection, while the compelling turns of a few up-and-comers give the seasoned pros a run for their money. 

In Hello from Bertha Romy Hooper plays eponymous hooker Bertha, bedridden with an unspecified affliction that at first seems exaggerated in order to avoid having to work, ultimately turning on its head as it becomes evident she’s actually downplaying the severity of her illness.  Stern whorehouse madam Goldie (Nicola Kawana) has accommodated Bertha’s incapacitation for two weeks so far but grows increasingly intolerant of her delusional ravings. 

Auto-Da-Fe concerns Eloi (Alexander Walker) openly despairing the immorality of modern society to his mother (Donogh Rees).  Working at the post office, Eloi has accidentally found a lewd photograph and is wracked with anguish as to how to deal with it.  His mother is ostensibly more laid back and accepting that things are as they are, including his paranoid hypochondria, until the sudden tragic conclusion. 

Miriama McDowell’s Mrs. Hardwicke-Moore, alleged wife of a plantation owner, in The Lady of Larkspur Lotion, echoes Williams’ more (if not most) famous character Blanche Dubois.  Judgmental landlady Mrs Wire (Emma Deakin) won’t have a bar of her claims to being accustomed to a more well-to-do, less cockroach-infested way of life, until the drunken writer (Paul Trimmer) speaks up in her defence, advocating mercy for the pitifully deluded woman. 

Finally, This Property is Condemned is the strongest of a strong set.  Playing hooky to fly his kite, Tom (Jimmy Hazelwood) meets scruffy-haired, rosy cheeked Willie (Timmie Cameron) playing on the railroad tracks.  They strike up an amicable conversation, mainly on the topic of her late sister Alva and her intimate relations with the local railway staff.  As with the previous pieces, endearing humour belies the tragic despair of the protagonist’s reality. 

A clear recurrent theme in the selected works is the tendency for desperate outcasts to escape into fantasy worlds as a matter of mental survival.  Steeped in the incredibly poetic eloquence of Williams’ writing, each play reads like a single scene from a larger complex narrative; some details provided in the dialogue with a number of gaps to be filled in by the viewer. 

Configured by James Beaumont and Donogh Rees, minimal sets, props authentic period costumes are excellently appointed to highlight the deeply humanistic action, as do the sound and lighting designs of Beaumont and Duncan Milne.  All in all Tennessee retro is one of those inspirational productions that a written description can’t really do justice, imbued as it is with the unique language of theatre. 

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