SUMMER AND SMOKE

Director's Notes

Summer and Smoke is a simply glorious play.  Tennessee Williams declared that the character of Alma was his finest creation.

Everyone knows the playwright Tennessee Williams’ classic plays –  A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and The Glass Menagerie.  They may not know him for Summer and Smoke, written at the same time as Streetcar.

When I came upon it it felt like a major discovery, a revelation.  It most recently arrived like a stealth bomber at the Almeida Theatre in London in 2018 under the skilful direction of Rebecca Frecknall, one of the most important directors working in theatre today.  Her production was five star rated across the board, it got a West End transfer and you couldn’t get a ticket.  As Michael Billington, the Guardian theatre critic at the time, wrote when reviewing it, the play had him “totally in its grip.”

Tennessee Williams’ fulsome instructions in his script are for no box sets, no slavish building of walls and doors or attention to time, but to free it up as a timeless story of two people, who find each other compellingly attractive. The themes in the play are timeless and so with a nod to the year of the play in 1916 we are also illuminating these themes in a way which I hope will relate to contemporary audiences.

Summer and Smoke is a tale of anxiety and emotional struggle.  Loneliness rips through it as a theme. Alma, a young minister’s daughter who teaches music and John, a young doctor’s son, a recent graduate from medical school, have been brought up side by side in small town Mississippi. However, they look at the world through a completely different lens. 

There is a battle between the body and the soul, about the physical and spiritual side of love. Religion vs science and an angel, often present, representing Alma’s spirituality. John’s physicality and Alma’s purity are palpable throughout the play.

The play is about them and the richly drawn group of people who interact with their lives. It is a classic tale of unrequited love of two people totally fascinated by each other, trying to come together and who, during the course of the play are given one last chance to breach the gap between them.

Williams is largely associated with ideas of repressed sexuality that struggle to break free, but he also writes poetically about the tender pain of impossible love and the consequence of being lost forever, not only to each other, but also to themselves. 

We are loading the production with wonderful music, live singing, stunning lighting ‘fireworks’ in the literal and abstract sense and much humour amongst the emotionally charged scenes. 

Don’t miss the opportunity to experience this marvellous company pull you into the intoxicating heat of a Mississippi summer, smouldering with passion and possibility. 

SUE MOORE,  DIRECTOR