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You could be forgiven for thinking that Tennessee Williams’s largely forgotten and uneven ‘A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur’, first produced in 1979, was one of his early plays. In fact, it was one of his last, and this well-performed, energetic revival at The Print Room shows it to be a strange beast – as well as a re-run of Williams’s familiar interests. The fading surroundings of the old Coronet in Notting Hill Gate also do a good job of complementing the worn-out shabbiness of the wrong side of the tracks in 1930s Missouri – although the shabby of Fotini Dimou's design is slightly more chic than bleak.
Set entirely over one sweltering Sunday morning in a rundown apartment in St Louis, Williams gives us two women sharing a home. A youngish teacher, Dotty (Laura Rogers), is preserving her looks by furiously exercising. She’s also anxiously waiting for a call from Ralph, the young, well-born principal of her school. Dotty’s ordinary-looking flatmate, Bodey (Debbie Chazen), a German-American, is more settled: she wishes that Dotty would lower her ambitions and marry her plain brother Buddy (another man we never meet; this is an all-woman play). A visit to the apartment by a third woman, Helena (Hermione Gulliford, almost Wildean in her grotesquery), a social climber who wants Dotty to live with her in an upscale part of town, only further highlights Dotty’s lack of a clear identity. She’s all adrift – socially, romantically, morally.
‘Lovely Sunday’ aches with longing and missed opportunities and the tragedy of not knowing yourself or being able to see what’s good for you at the end of your own nose. In Dotty, there are hints of Williams’s earlier tragic heroines, and especially Laura in ‘The Glass Menagerie’ – something Laura Rogers stresses in her fragile performance. But this is also a comic work, even a farce at points, and the changing tones can make it feel awkward, even incomplete.
Still, there are simple decisions in the writing that remind us what a great dramatist Williams could be: the unseen men; the planning of a Sunday picnic that symbolises happiness over despair; a blocked toilet offstage; even the silent telephone. ‘Lovely Sunday’ also features some frank talk – whether it’s about a woman having sex with a colleague in the back of a car or about a young man’s messy premature ejaculation – which the morality of earlier decades simply wouldn’t have allowed.
As a play, it’s curiously relaxed and playful in its mix of the light and dark, which allows Michael Oakley’s production to move through several moods without ever feeling entirely coherent. This is an entertaining curiosity, more fitfully diverting than fully engaging.