Morning:
14°c
Some fares could fall by more than a third when Oyster is extended to every national rail station in London, it has emerged
More...
New Moon is nothing if not an international advertisement for the hungry virtues of virginity and young people can’t get enough of it
The Twilight Saga: New Moon
Theatre
A smart, prickly and rewarding view of sexual and emotional confusion
Cock
Restaurants
Kitchen W8 is a bargain for this area, if such sophistication is what you crave
Kitchen W8
Too long and drawn out but very entertaining with excellent special effects
This is a peculiar play and does not work for me. Some of it is very funny but there are real flaws
Alex has a strong powerful voice and was faultless, she is far better now than she was on the X-Factor
London,
Nicholas de Jongh's rating
Reader rating
Dir: Bill Bryden.
Cast: Jack Shepherd, Iain Robertson
Description: Arcola Theatre presents Tennessee Williams's tale of a group of nine misfits in a bar on a foggy night in 1972. Directed by Bill Bryden.
Trains: BR: Dalston Kingsland 
Phone: 0207503 1646
Website: www.arcolatheatre.com
Extra info: Food, Pub
Emptiness at the bar: Bill (Steve Nicolson) and Leona (Sian Thomas)
The adventurous Arcola, which specialises in neglected and little-known work from home and abroad, now takes a disappointing, conventional turn. Bill Bryden directs an engaging, well orchestrated revival of a late, under-par Tennessee Williams tragi-comedy. If only the choice had been bolder.
It could have fallen on the playwright’s Clothes for a Summer Hotel, which involves the
asylum-incarceration of Scott Fitzgerald’s wife, or a stage realisation of Williams’s screenplay, Secret Places of the Heart, again with a mental hospital milieu. For these two late works, not yet seen in London, revealed Williams’s almost-burnt out talent in an Indian summer blaze.
By contrast, Small Craft Warnings, admired at its 1973 London premiere, assembles an all-too familiar collection of lost hopers, derelicts and lovelorn loners from the Tennesse Williams museum of outcasts, placing them in a bar on the Californian coast.
Playing Williams’s alter ego, a writer saddled with gay self-loathing and an unsuitable pick-up, Greg Hicks brilliantly registers jaded disillusionment but cannot disguise the fact that this one character would never have stayed in the bar. The others are different.
Meredith MacNeil’s venereally-challenged, diaphanously costumed Violet, drifts around like a doped, more up-front Blanche du Bois, her hands exploring down between the legs of Steve Nicolson’s Bill. Nicolson looks too mature as the bit of bisexual rough stuff loosely entwined with Leona, a travelling beautician.
But Leona, one of Williams’s tough-talking, foul-mouthed and lonesome broads, is played up to the comic, pugnacious hilt by the hilarious Sian Thomas, revelling in a corn-cracker voice and a talent to abuse.
Miss Thomas’s blistering encounter with Violet, to whom the wonderful Miss MacNeil lends a glazed torpor and bemused desperation as she clings to her last lifebuoy, Jack Shepherd’s compassionate barman, breaks this long-winded evening’s stasis.
Williams’s characters are weighed down by lots of symbols and excessive alcohol: there is even a drunken, struck-off doctor. They spend their time revealing their inner selves in plotless chatter, word-wars and revelatory soliloquies out of kilter with the play’s realism.
They are the small craft of the title, buffeted by life’s waves. Thick fog ensures no one can see their way out of the engulfing murkiness. Even the dead sailfish hung above the bar probably signifies something.
Yet there is something attractive and bracing about the stoicism of these lonely Small Craft people, facing up to hard home truths.
Until 18 October. Information: 020 7503 1646.
Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.
There are three very good reasons to head to north London to the Arcola Theatre to see this. Firstly, it’s a rare sighting of a fascinating late Tennessee Williams play - not a great play, the usual collection of dysfunctional folk, but an interesting one. Secondly, the return of Bill Bryden - one of the greats, in my view (and it certainly shows here) - to live theatre direction in London after what seems like a long time. Thirdly, a cast any West End producer who isn’t obsessed with Hollywood turns would die for - with cameo’s from the likes of Greg Hicks, understated gems from Jack Shepherd and a real star turn from Sian Thomas. You feel like a voyeur virtually inside Haydn Griffin’s realistic 70’s South California bar, a sense heightened by the fact that characters occasionally talk direct to the audience. Anyone seriously intersted in 20th century drama should head north post haste!
- Gareth James, London UK
