Bewley’s Café Theatre, Dublin
***
The Confederate Daughters Society has come to a critical juncture in its history: fresh committee elections at a time of burgeoning social change, which, in 1950s Louisiana, is in no particular hurry. Negotiating its powder-room politics from her breakfast table, Cornelia Scott gets the lowdown from her woman on the inside over the phone: the order of business, a suspected putsch against her, who ate what for lunch. But something else is on her mind.
In accordance with every tradition surrounding a Tennessee Williams play, Cornelia must be referred to as a "fading Southern Belle". But you'd never say that to her face. Played by Catherine Byrne as a commander in a nightgown, she has "rallied her forces" and demands to be re-elected "by acclimation" even as she deplores new energies directed to the Civil Rights programme. Who wouldn't love her?
Well, her secretary, for one. Grace Lancaster (Noelle Browne), who has shared her home for 15 years, is so meek that even the sun tries not to bother her. “The light was so dim it didn’t even wake me up,” she says, by way of a pallid morning greeting. Sitting together in Barbara McCarthy’s blanched costumes on Andrew Murray’s economic set of a table, cradle phone and lilac curtains, the indomitable Cornelia seems attentive to Grace’s every shivering vulnerability. This strain, she says, comes “always when something is almost spoken between us”.
At this point, that unspoken something is a complete mystery to all, except Tennessee Williams, the entire membership of the Confederate Daughters Society (and its affiliates) presumably, and absolutely everyone sitting in the audience. This is the love that dare not speak its name, further interrupted by a plinking victrola (“Music is dishonest: it smoothes things over instead of speaking them out.”), the ringing phone (“Oh, is that you Esmerelda?”) and Grace’s endless attack of the vapours. You begin to wonder if director Maisie Lee’s production for Bewley’s Café Theatre has noticed something more than a closeted relationship of almost tantrically-sustained frustration?
The performances, in Byrne’s strident declaiming and Browne’s tremulous demurring, suggest nothing more forcibly than a long-term companionship between a gale-force wind and a leaf. But Williams is up to something more sly; a genteel depiction of fading Southern sadomasochism. “Stop that silly little female trick,” commands Byrne’s dom. “My grey is dust,” Browne’s passive-aggressive sub will later say. “The colour of cobwebs. The grey of something forgotten.”
This is all served with the solemnity of queer historicism, as a wistful wreath is laid down for generations of women who could never admit – let alone act upon – their sexual desires. But when Cornelia desperately longs “to keep you here forever”, or Grace flits away to the victrola for the umpteenth time, you long to see another kind of confederacy acknowledged. Alone together in this ecstasy of agony, unspoken and unconsumed, you realise that these daughters may have really met their match.
Until July 23
