fri 08/11/2024

Tennessee Williams

Edinburgh Fringe 2023 reviews: Tennessee, Rose / The Ballad of Truman Capote

Tennessee, Rose, Pleasance Dome ★★★Clare Cockburn's new play posits the notion that all the women in Tennessee Williams' work were inspired in some way by his older sister, Rose, who spent most of her life in mental institutions after being...

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A Streetcar Named Desire, Almeida Theatre review - Patsy Ferran rises above fussy staging

It’s a long way from the dank chill of an English winter to the stultifying heat of a New Orleans summer, but we’ve been here before at this venue. Five years on from their award-winning Summer And Smoke, Rebecca Frecknall is back in the director’s...

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The Glass Menagerie, Duke of York's Theatre review - memories flare and fade

The stage is cluttered with objects; a pianola sits stage left; a large cabinet, soon to be revealed as a display case for tiny glass ornaments, dominates the centre. A man, gaunt, in his 40s perhaps, wanders among this stuff.He is our narrator (...

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The Two Character Play, Hampstead Theatre review - tender, poetic and piercingly cruel

It’s the trivia question no one ever thought to ask: where was the only Tennessee Williams play premiered outside America first performed? The unlikely answer (so unlikely that even artistic director Roxana Silbert apparently didn’t know it until...

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Truman & Tennessee: An Intimate Conversation review - genius dogged by disappointment

Kindred literary spirits who overlapped in any number of ways make for riveting stuff in Truman & Tennessee: An Intimate Conversation. Filmmaker Lisa Immordino Vreeland folds archival footage of the legendary writers together with...

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Theatre Lockdown Special 6: A prolific playwright, a timeless play, and speeches galore

Can we really be entering a third month in lockdown? Indeed we can, and culture, thank heavens, shows no signs whatsoever of leaving us in the lurch. This week's lineup of highlights offers a typically electic bunch, ranging from two sizable...

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theartsdesk Q&A: Lia Williams on the challenges of theatre

Lia Williams is not an actor who looks for easy options. Twice she has played two characters in the same production, switching between them for different performances. In Pinter's Old Times in 2013 she and Kristin Scott Thomas alternated Anna with...

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Orpheus Descending, Menier Chocolate Factory review - Tennessee Williams scorcher needs more firepower

Where would Tennessee Williams's onetime flop be without the British theatre to rehabilitate it on an ongoing basis? Arriving at the Menier Chocolate Factory in a co-production with Theatre Clwyd, where Tamara Harvey's production has already been...

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Summer and Smoke, Almeida Theatre - exquisite renaissance of Tennessee Williams's neglected play

That this 1948 Tennessee Williams play is rarely performed seems nothing short of a travesty, thanks to the awe-inspiring case made for it by Rebecca Frecknall’s exquisite Almeida production. Aided by the skyrocketing Patsy Ferran, it also makes a...

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Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Apollo Theatre review - Sienna Miller lets rip

"Maggie the cat is alive: I am alive," or so remarks the feline, eternally frustrated heroine of Tennessee Williams's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. That self-assessment has rarely been truer than as spoken by Sienna Miller in the terrific West End...

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The Glass Menagerie, Duke of York's

The writing of Tennessee Williams, said his contemporary Arthur Miller, planted “the flag of beauty on the shores of commercial theatre”. This American production of Williams’s breakthrough play – a hit on Broadway and at the Edinburgh Festival last...

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Edinburgh Festival 2016: Alan Cumming/ The Glass Menagerie/ Mark Thomas

Alan Cumming Sings Sappy Songs ★★★★★ Is this even theatre? Hardly – cabaret, more like, as Scottish actor-author-provocateur Alan Cumming sings his way through songs by Sondheim, Weill, Lady Gaga and more, interspersing them with anecdotes...

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