Anyone for lobotomy?
Suddenly Last Summer
by Tennessee Williams
Company B, Belvoir St Theatre
Sydney, until July 23
Review by Brendan Doyle
Suddenly Last Summer, written by Tennessee Williams in 1957, assaulted US theatre-goers with a nightmarish vision of their society. Forty years later, in Neil Armfield's production, the play hasn't lost its power to intrigue and disturb.
The performance begins with a shadow play behind a vast plastic curtain that hangs across the back of the stage. In an obvious reference to Hitchcock's Psycho, a naked woman is being manhandled and carried off. Not in the original, but it tells the audience that this is going to be theatrically entertaining.
The play proper begins in the garden of a southern US mansion, where we find the old and fragile but wealthy Mrs Violet Venable, praising her late son's poetic achievements to Dr Cukrowicz, a young surgeon. She has decided to avenge her son Sebastian's mysterious death a year ago, which she blames on his cousin Catharine, now confined to a mental asylum.
Mrs Venable has asked the doctor, who performs lobotomies, to be present at a meeting with Catharine. Mrs Venable's plan is fiendishly simple: if the doctor agrees to perform a lobotomy on Catharine, she will financially support his work. At the same time, Catharine's terrible secret — the truth of how Sebastian died — will be lost forever. The good doctor will "cut that horrible story out of her brain".
So far, so good. The doctor is keen to get hold of cash for his expanding brain surgery business. So too is Sebastian's cousin George, who stands to get lots of moolah from Sebastian's will — if only Catharine will shut up about the circumstances of the death. The truth, George fears, may bring Mrs Venable to challenge the will.
The stage is set for a drama of tragic proportions. Or is it just melodrama? Will the all-powerful doctor lobotomise innocent Catharine for filthy lucre? Will Catharine somehow manage to save herself? Can Sebastian's mother succeed in forever denying the truth about the son she idolises before the world?
From this scarcely credible dramatic premise (but then truth is always stranger than fiction) Williams propels us into a world of madness where, as usual, the character who is labelled mad, Catharine, has truth, and ultimate sanity, on her side.
Unexpectedly, and to Mrs Venable's horror, the doctor injects Catharine with a truth serum, hypnotically telling her to give up all resistance and relate how Sebastian died. And she does.
At a Mexican beach where she was holidaying with him, Sebastian had paid starving, homeless young local boys to have sex with him. Later, some of these boys had killed Sebastian and devoured parts of his body!
Are we to take all this literally? Williams's text hovers on the edge of tragedy, nightmare and melodrama. So does Armfield's production. Everything in it contributes to the slowly rising atmosphere of madness that culminates in Catharine's harrowing revelation, worthy of Greek tragedy.
The truth of Williams's own family was no less tragic. When his beloved, troubled sister Rose alleged that she had suffered sexual abuse by her father, her mother consented for Rose to undergo a prefrontal lobotomy. That was in 1937, when the operation was still highly experimental, and Williams never forgave his mother.
But beyond his own dysfunctional family, Williams wanted to shake US citizens out of apathy and denial, to make people see and acknowledge the truth of human behaviour, no matter how "unnatural" it may have been considered at the time, as was still the case with homosexuality.
Gillian Jones as Mrs Venable is creepy enough, although her attempt at a southern accent made her at times hard to understand. Catherine McClements as Catharine shines in this production, and Dan Wylie is delightful as George, the impecunious cousin.