Suddenly Last Summer

Fifteen years after The Glass Menagerie, Tennessee Williams wrote yet again in 1958 about his family nightmares: his lobotomised sister, his controlling, repressed mother and his own struggles as a homosexual poet.

Menagerie was given on outstanding production by Belvoir last year; now Kip Williams masterfully directs Suddenly Last Summer for the Sydney Theatre Company, in what is, compared to Tennessee’s other works, a rare revival. 

It’s a haunting Gothic story, set in the creepily verdant garden of matriach Mrs Venable (Robyn Nevin), as she tries to convince a young neurologist to lobotomise her niece. Catharine, you see, keeps spitting out vile stories about the fancies of her late son Sebastian, and how he was devoured by paedophiliac demons on his annual Mediterranean retreat. Suddenly last summer Sebastian, we learn, replaced his elegant mother; Catherine offered younger bait with which to procure his boys. 

This 1950’s moral horror unfolds through lengthy monologues and a rising hysteria from the others  – Mrs Venable’s enigmatic assistant (Melita Jurisic), Catharine’s incarcerating nurse (an officiously concerned Paula Arundell) and Catharine’s scheming mother and brother (Susan Prior and Brandon McClelland), desperate that her crazy truth won’t rob them of a Venable inheritance.

Williams’ production takes the recent practice of live onstage filming and projection to the very limit. The first 30-minute garden scene is played unseen behind a huge stage wall, except for the projections upon it.  Luckily, his leads in Nevin, in Mark Leonard Winter as the compromised doctor, and particularly Eryn Jean Norvill, outstanding as the mercurial Catharine, provide the power and detailed breadth of performance to feed the filming. 

Some observers found all this faddish, gratuitous and compromised by low quality camera work. Theatrical rhythms, especially at the end, occasionally went awry, and the cameras had a sometimes alienating impact which Brecht would have admired.  But mostly they added a psychological intimacy, a focus on the storytellers and their motives as opposed to just the long tale of Sebastian’s misadventure.

Designer Alice Babidge beautifully captures a late 1930’s costuming matched well to character; her version of Sebastian’s strange garden on the wide Drama Theatre stage has less impact.

Martin Portus

Images: (top) Eryn Jean Norvill, and (lower) Melita Jurisic, Robyn Nevin, Susan Prior & Paula Arundell in Sydney Theatre Company’s production of Suddenly Last Summer. Photographer: Brett Boardman