This Property is Condemned

Bewley's Cafe Theatre, Dublin

This short play by Tennessee Williams is typical of the author's early work, a sentimental treatment of a cruel story. Its title illustrates both aspects: a 13-year-old girl lives in a mouldering house, and her life is already destined to be brutish and short. Society has cut her adrift.

Willie has been deserted by both parents, who ran a boarding-house-cum-brothel, and her elder sister Alva, who drifted into prostitution, has recently died of tuberculosis. When she appears, dressed in Alva's garish clothes, she meets Tom, a young boy dodging school, and they talk. She has become a fantasist, inventing optimistic scenarios, but the ugly truth peeps out through cracks in her colourful words.

It becomes plain that Willie's time is running out. She has to scavenge for food around the small Mississippi town, and the clothes she thinks fancy are bizarre in the context of her depressed existence. Embedded in the torrents of her speech are hints that she has begun the fatal round of prostitution, and already has intimations of the end that awaits her.

The author's language is colourful and offbeat, an effective vehicle for the actors to explore their roles. Sarah-Jane Drummey's high-pitched Willie, suggestive of the defence mechanisms at work beneath an apparent self-confidence, is a performance in depth. As Tom, Owen McDonnell, with far less to say and do, does it with a presence that matches hers, a young actor to watch.

Society has always contained, if not embraced, young people for whom life is effectively stunted before they have gained any control over it. This play pleads for them with a sympathy manifest in this production, sensitively directed by Bairbre N∅ Chaoimh.

Runs until September 15th; booking at 086-8784001