Platforms
I have taken part this week in two platforms, at the Old Vic and the National Theatre, celebrating the fiftieth anniversary — to the very day — of John Osborne’s The Entertainer, and the revival of Tennessee Williams’s The Rose Tattoo. How potent these old play are, and how skimpy they make most contemporary drama look.
When The Entertainer first opened, Kenneth Tynan reviewed it in the same week as he covered Williams’s Camino Real and Victor Borge’s one-man show in the West End; it was, he said, one of the most interesting and provocative weeks of London theatre since the war. He mantained, however, that Osborne had not yet found a way of writing a convincing role for an actress, an assertion completely contradicted in Pam Ferris’s magnificent portrayal of Phoebe in the current revival.
At the NT, Zoe Wanamaker is tremendous as Serafina delle Rose even though she is slightly too old for the part — Serafina was married at 14, widowed at 26 and reborn to sexual fulfilment by the end of the play before she is thirty (she is also pregnant again) — and not all that Sicilian. Williams wrote the role for the great Anna Magnani, who felt she could not risk her shaky English on stage but played Serafina in the heavily bowdlerised film opposite Burt Lancaster.
Can British actresses play Williams? Julie Walters, padded and slatternly, was a fairly good Serafina, falling heavily on the comedy at the expense of sexual neediness, while Kathryn Hunter was rapt and mesmeric without, again, really embodying the sexual life force of the role. When it comes to the other great Anna Magnani role in Williams, the Lady Torrance in Orpheus Descending, both Vanessa Redgrave and Helen Mirren have come close (Magnani played the role in the film version, re-named The Fugitive Kind, opposite Marlon Brando as the guitar-picking Orpheus to her small-town Euridyce). Maybe Pam Ferris will astonish us further by taking up the challenge after revitalising Osborne’s great state-of-the-nation epic alonsgide Robert Lindsay’s newly definitive Archie Rice.