Tennessee comes to Northampton
What pleasure Tennessee Williams might have taken in the European premiere of his 1937 play Spring Storm at the Royal & Derngate in Northampton. It’s a prentice piece all right, but one well worth reviving.
And it’s a spirited rebuff, too, to all the lazy commentators who’ve dismissed it down the years. Williams’s fawning, deadly dull official biographer, Lyle Leverich, doesn’t tell you anything about the play at all.
And when Donald Spoto confidently declares that the play is awash in obvious melodramatic sentiment and devoid of any original touch you just wonder whether he even bothered to read it.
Williams had obviously been smitten by T S Eliot and first called the play “April is the Cruellest Month” but he wisely changed that to Spring Storm.
Apart from an unsuccessful little New York production, in which, I gather from Tom Erhardt, the estate’s executor, that the attractive girl and the unattractive girl, rivals for the rich man’s hand, were cast the wrong way round — “The attractive girl wasn’t attractive at all; she was very unattractive!” he declares, seriously affronted — this is the first major production.
And going to Northampton for the Saturday matinee was a very agreeable outing.
The huge market square, surrounded by the remnants of Georgian architecture and the magnificent Victorian Guildhall, is a splendid hub, with its down-at-heel town pubs and stalls of local farm produce and nick-nacks.
The old fishmarket is being converted into an art gallery, the fate of fishmarkets and dairies everywhere these days, alas.
But the building is light and airy, with a high, stanchioned roof, and the locals are setting about the conversion with a will that is still waiting on a green light from the Arts Council. They were painting the walls completely white in readiness for a deluge of paitings.
But none of all this quite prepared me for the hubbub I encountered at the Royal & Derngate.
As the matinee crowd gathered, we mingled with participants in the city’s fourth annual Malcolm Arnold Festival, not to mention people looking for the drop-in playwriting workshop.
It was a great buzz. The seriously undervalued Arnold — every piano student is familiar with his rewarding tasks for players wearing L-plates, and he wrote countless film scores, including those for Bridge on the River Kwai and Whistle Down the Wind — was a local lad, and the weekend festivities included talks and performances of his work all over the Derngate complex.
There was also a composition competition, and I managed to catch a lively short piece by Clara Catt, one of the horn players in the Northampton County Youth Brass Band.
I was already missing the place by the time I reached the railway station, where stragglers from the rugby union match between Northampton and Sale (there was a crowd of 10,000) joined me on the excellent, fast train service back to London.
We all know about the range of activity and excitements on the South Bank, but it’s good to know that Northampton has its own vibrant cultural options, too…and it’s far from a load of old cobblers, as they affectionately call the local soccer team.