Theatre

The Rose Tattoo
Until Aug 8 2007
This event has finished
National Theatre, Olivier, South Bank, London, SE1 9PX
Rating:
By Jane Edwardes

Posted: Mon Apr 2 2007
Steven Pimlott’s return to the National was hideously cut short when he died of cancer. Pimlott’s close friend, Nicholas Hytner, took over as director, but the actors must have struggled to pick themselves up after such a blow. Maybe they were helped by Tennessee Williams’ life-affirming comedy in which a widow learns to live and love again some years after her husband’s death.

‘We are Sicilians. We are not cold-blooded,’ declares Zoë Wanamaker’s Serafina delle Rose. That’s something of an understatement. Blazing with energy, Wanamaker swaggers, struts and seethes as the Sicilian-American who boasts of her husband’s stamina in bed and goes into sluttish purdah when he is shot trying to smuggle dope under the bananas in his ten-ton lorry. A fervent Catholic, she alternately prays to her husband’s ashes and to the Virgin Mary on the wall. She locks up her daughter, Rosa, to protect her from a sailor who is keener to respect the daughter’s virginity than she is herself. Interrogating this young man, Serafina can’t refrain from admiring the shape of his bum. Then in a single day she discovers that her husband may not have been as faithful as she thought and she meets Darrell D’Silva’s amiable clown, Alvaro Mangiacavallo.

This being a Williams play, it’s a bit overlong and there is the usual pile-up of symbols, from the rose that symbolises love, to the goat – a real life ram makes an appearance – that suggests a more basic sexuality. The atmosphere can be operatic: in Mark Thompson’s design, Serafina’s house sits in the centre of the stage surrounded by children playing and a chorus of Sicilian women who are eager both to console and to pry. Beyond their community lies a more brutal, puritanical USA. But in this unusually optimistic comedy-fantasy, Williams doesn’t allow it to destroy Serafina’s chance for a better future.