Lady and the tramp

ORPHEUS DESCENDING, Royal Exchange, Manchester
TENNESSEE Williams’ steamy drama of — what else but — Deep Southern small town life isn’t often performed today, and for good reason.

Not one of the playwright’s greater efforts, it suffers from weak initial exposition — gossips in the general store tell us about dying man-of-the-shop and Klan bully Jabe and his Italian-descent wife Lady — and gives way to a fairly lame retelling of the Orpheus myth. It’s a good hour before story and players settle in.

Drifter Val Xavier breezes into town with guitar in hand, gets work at the store and swoops down into Lady’s underworld of pain and frustration and offers salvation — only for everything to crowd in and ruin it. Just like every other Williams story.

In most of the playwright’s work it’s not really the plot you go for but the atmosphere; the heat, the humidity, the torrid emotions of the leads. But this play is flawed; too many minor characters crowd for attention, diluting the tragedy at the show’s heart. There’s little sense of heat and humidity either; the set, with its counter and boarded floor, rarely suggests heat and lust.

Sarah Frankcom’s production for the Exchange makes things slightly worse by putting two actors together who are individually very good, but together didn’t quite convince me of their passion.

The strongest performance of the evening is undoubtedly that of Imogen Stubbs as “Lady” Torrance, wife of bully Jabe.

Even here there is a slight niggle: Stubbs in her early fifties is as slim, vivacious and sexy as she was in her thirties — not the fading former beauty of the play. It wouldn’t take a troubadour new in town to sweep for off her feet; any guy would fancy her. Luckily Stubbs makes up for her unfortunate lack of dowdiness by playing to her strengths, with humour and sexiness.

Opposite her the singer in question, Xavier (Luke Norris) seems almost clean-cut, despite his snakeskin jacket and truculent manner. We rarely see a hair out of place.

Though the guy exudes animal magnetism, the way the scenes of passion are handled you couldn’t really imagine Lady and the tramp running away together — he’s a bit wet. So when it all goes wrong, it hardly comes as a shock.


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