Summer and Smoke Review: Sarah Mulgrew Stars In Sweltering Production
The acting shines in an excellent production of Tennessee Williams’ complex and tender work.
The cast in early rehearsals via Alessandra Rey
Summer and Smoke is a play of passion. It sizzles. Its heat is overwhelming from the outset: arriving at the warm wooden set, bathed in a golden glow from Evie Chandler’s lighting design, we are instantly relocated to the American South. Glorious Hill, Mississippi is blistering, repressive in both its heat and its strict morality.
Emblematic of its repressiveness is Alma Winemiller, and Sarah Mulgrew offers a stunning performance as the ‘soul’ of the production. Alma is faced with a difficult balancing act, her commitment to politeness and good diction wrestling with her enduring love for the carnally-inclined doctor John Buchanan (Ollie Flowers). Mulgrew’s performance perfectly portrays the doppelganger who bubbles underneath her restrained surface. From her first appearance on stage – agitated, twitching, chest heaving – Mulgrew’s Alma seems always on high alert, aware both of her obligations as a minister’s daughter (Jacob Benhayoun’s Reverend Winemiller is a stern force) and of the feelings which John stirs within her. She wants to be loved not for her body but her mind – yet feels nothing for the nice yet pitifully bumbling Roger Deremus (Jake Leigh). To the play’s end she wants what she cannot have, and this desperation seems to fuel the fire of Mulgrew’s delivery.
Ollie Flowers also impresses as John. He has a cool exterior; his relaxed, easy posture is the clear adversary to Alma’s stiffness. His performance weaves in moments of startling intimacy amidst light-hearted mockery and blinkered didacticism. He is entirely convinced of his view on human feelings, human ‘hunger’, until suddenly he is not. Flowers skilfully depicts this U-turn, marked by his romances with the socially sexualised Rosa Gonzales (Gwynneth Horbury) to young pretty Nellie (Louisa Grinyer).
The characters’ respective transformations are clearly marked by costume (designed by Martha Shaylor); in their final interaction, John appears a professional in his white suit while Alma has lost her puritanical dress and has literally let her hair down. Strikingly, the actors exchange body language in this scene. Alma moves more freely, with passion and certainty, while John stands fidgeting with his feet too close together. He now fizzes with the labour of denying desire, and as he weeps while embracing Nellie we see his final, futile plea towards fulfilment before resigning himself to a life without Alma’s warmth. The absolute role reversal which Williams writes into his play is vividly realised in this production.
In the final scene, beneath the audience’s laughter at Archie Kramer’s (Xander Pang) poor attempts at Spanish, a suspenseful, almost ominous sound, like a rumble, can be heard. What could be staged as the confirmation of Alma’s liberation is thus complicated in this production. Are we to believe that the body has precedence over the soul, or vice versa? While they are set up in opposition to each other, discontent seems to accompany both options, as neither John nor Alma seem truly happy at the play’s end.
The anatomy chart – a permanent fixture on the stage – reminds us throughout the show that there is no space in the body for the soul. This lack of space is made yet more claustrophobic by the persistent evocation of heat onstage, by Alma’s frantic energy, by the kindling of sexual tension that is never brought to the boil. This production smoulders with the pain of intense yet unfulfilled emotions, with Mulgrew’s performance in particular offering a masterclass in portraying whether character resides in the mind or in the body. Seeking to solder the gap between the body and soul, Summer and Smoke is a tender play about the complexities of intimacy and incompatibility.
Summer and Smoke is on until at the ADC theatre until Saturday the 21st of October.