Late Tennessee Williams can be pretty turgid stuff but Bill Bryden’s production of ‘Small Craft Warnings’ happily defies low expectations and delivers a scorching evening. Like Eugene O’Neill’s ‘The Iceman Cometh’, the 1972 play is set in a bar where a cast of marginal characters soak up the alcohol to survive and forget their reality. The latter sometimes intrudes. Sian Thomas’s beautician Leona bursts in to discover her slob of a boyfriend being touched up by Violet, who is, according to the furious Leona, ‘made out of biscuit dough’. The struck-off doctor quietly empties a bottle of brandy before going off to deliver a baby. Tension rises when two ‘fruits’ saunter in, one of them a jaded scriptwriter who’s annoyed by the other’s display of affection.
Bill Bryden, best known for his Cottesloe company of tough actors in the ’80s, draws terrific performances from his actors. You could spend the whole evening just watching Jack Shepherd’s taciturn barman. Meredith MacNeill is outstanding as the disturbed Violet who consents to her own abuse. Williams must surely have been thinking of his sister Rose but he sympathises with all his characters. One can’t help feeling that such empathy is misplaced in the case of both the doctor and Steve Nicolson’s crude, homophobic Bill, who thinks he can live off his dick for ever. Sian Thomas’s Leona drives the play forward with her panache and vitality, exposing the others’ illusions although blind to her own. Thomas is almost too mesmeric – it’s hard to believe that Leona couldn’t find someone better than Bill. Inevitably, Williams doesn’t know when to stop and the redundant monologues are far too literary. But the honesty of the rest of the writing is matched by the company’s intense, truthful acting, made more exciting by being seen in the close quarters of the Arcola’s raw space.
