'Spring Storm' at The National Theatre

On Wednesday night I was dragged to the National Theatre to see 'Spring Storm' at the Cottesloe in the National. Or rather, round the corner from the National. Chris seems to have an odd theory that the more Tennessee Williams plays I see the more my antipathy will lessen.

You see, I don't have a good history with Mr Williams. The first play of his that I saw was 'The Glass Menagerie' in Toronto a number of years ago and I fell asleep in the front row, in the middle, right in front of a table with a glass menagerie on it. I found it uninspiring. A few years ago we saw 'The Rose Tattoo' which I quite liked, but that might've been down to Zoe Wanamaker being in the lead role. We saw 'A Streetcar Named Desire' last year with Rachel Weisz in the lead and I sort of didn't quite like it since all the shouting and simpering put me off... so, what about 'Spring Storm'?

Mr Williams sticks with his usual theme of The South, white trash versus money, family history versus nothing, the poor white girl with a good family name falling for trash but being groomed for the rich boy in town. Add in poor librarians, families with an exaggerated sense of their history, outdoor parties and storms and lots of Southern accents and you probably have the play in a bottle.

I couldn't quite decide what the play was really trying to say. There's the obvious story of the genteel mother without money wanting her daughter to marry well which the daughter sees as a form of prostitution since she loves the white trash in town. Every now and then that came across as a very strong message and then it was ignored as the girl seems to actually fall in love. So which is it?

The main characters were all women - lots of women in the play but only three men and none of them had particularly strong roles. The lead character was young Heavenly, played by Liz White who gave it the right kind of humour, passion and hopelessness as she considers her potential fates. Also impressive were her mother and aunt, rather stereotype roles, one harsh and the other more sympathetic, both playing off each other in the continual domestic battle of the widowed aunt living in her brother's house with the family. Jacqueline King and Joanna Bacon were excellent in these sparring roles.

I wasn't too keen on the set - initially it was quite interesting being designed to look like debris from a Mississippi flood under which a load of furniture and props were stashed but it ultimately looked a bit showy and unnecessary. It made for an interesting interlude when the cast built a bookshelf on stage and threw books at each other but what was that meant to suggest other than they had a designer who presumably wanted to amaze but ultimately fail? I found the lads coming on to re-build the set by pulling chairs from under the wreckage or carrying on tables every now and then rather irritating and slowed down the momentum of the play.

Truth to tell, I didn't dislike this play and it had some interesting things going on in it. Certainly better (to me, at least) than that 'Glass Menagerie' thing.