Suddenly Last Summer

Stephen Nicolazzo and designer Eugyeene Teh are the ideal choice to give this Southern Gothic piece a heightened, stylised reality.  There’s an ironic, riskily comic mode at first, but when the luminous Kate Cole takes over the story and the stage, the darkness and horror of this fable close in and dominate to the shattering conclusion.  

Despite its reputation, its being frequently revived, and its being adapted as a movie (most famously with Elizabeth Taylor and Katherine Hepburn) and for television (with Maggie Smith), Suddenly Last Summer is a curious piece.  Although tension builds and builds as we wait to know the truth - what really happened suddenly last summer, almost all of the play’s ninety-minute running time is taken up by characters telling other characters about past events – or their version of them. 

The narrators are, first, the grieving mother, Mrs Venable (Jennifer Vuletic), a domineering, rich, powerful ‘steel magnolia’, her authority emphasised by the way she treats her assistant, Miss Foxhill (Chanella Macri).  Mrs Venable is desperate to cling to her version of Sebastian, her son, the sensitive poet, of her very, very special relationship with him and their travels together.  We will learn a complete contradiction of all this, but she rhapsodises, seeking to convince a stolid Doctor ‘Sugar’ (Charles Purcell), who happens to experiment with lobotomies.  She wants him to hear the horrible lies about Sebastian’s death and do something surgical about them – to cut them out of her niece Catherine’s brain.

Catherine (Kate Cole), Sebastian’s cousin and travelling companion – that she was the latter is another source of outrage for Mrs Venable -  claims she witnessed Sebastian’s death – and worse, the sordid, vicious reasons for it… Catherine is escorted by Sister Felicity (Caroline Lee), who brings her from the state asylum where she has been drugged and otherwise mistreated – at the behest of the all-powerful Mrs Venable.  All forces are arrayed against Catherine – that is, against the truth.  Kate Cole is exemplary as Catherine.  She gives us a fragility alongside a wry humour and a stubborn courage so that she rises above the other grubby, compliant or deluded characters and personifies heart and virtue.

Yes, there are some minor characters – Catherine’s mother, Mrs Holly (Zoe Boesen, the most successful with the ‘Southern’ accent and unafraid to be grotesque) and her indolent brother George (Harvey Zielinski), who are also desperate to prevent Catherine persisting in her version of Sebastian’s death in Cabeza de lobo in Spain – but for mercenary reasons.  They stand to benefit from Sebastian’s will and Mrs Venable is blocking them.

Sound design by Daniel Nixon is pervasive and melodramatic, which is entirely appropriate here.  Katie Sfetkidis’ lighting works through a constant haze until Catherine is isolated in a golden glow and at last the truth is spoken – so forcefully, so vividly, so bravely that even Mrs Venable cannot escape it. 

All this takes place in Sebastian’s garden.  As designed by Mr Teh, it is a claustrophobic, foetid place with walls of grey – as if dead and decaying - vine with just a hint of magnolia and hanging bromeliads above.  This setting, together with Mrs Venable’s perverse boasting of its exotic beasts and plants, set the tone perfectly.  The costumes, however, are another matter with what look like arbitrary and puzzling choices.  While Mrs Venable’s ensemble of spidery ice is perfect, with other characters is as if Mr Teh wants to mock them.

But that is a minor distraction.  We hang on every word delivered by this great cast in which Ms Vuletic, with her ruthless but sentimental cruelty, and Ms Cole, fighting to cling to what she witnessed with pity and terror, sweep all before them.

Michael Brindley

Photographer: Jodie Hutchinson