Theatre - Kate Kellaway on an inspired production of Orpheus Descending

We are in a dowdy shoe store - it could as easily be Ireland as the American south. The light is dusty and brown as a pair of brogues. Two women are talking loudly; there is a rhythm to their voices that could fool you into thinking their conversation harmless. But it is alive with warnings. They are gossiping about violence.

Tennessee Williams's Orpheus Descending (currently at the Donmar Warehouse, London) is a challenging work to take on. Like all his best plays, it is a potent mixture of violence, sweetness, anguish and desire. Williams's sentimentality is a volatile ingredient - essential to the piece, it must never be allowed to tame the play's wildness.

Williams was obsessed by people who are outlawed - sometimes by their own choosing. He respected the wish to be a fugitive from life and its ordinary miseries, but he knew that wild and "free" do not mean the same thing. Carol is the first "wild" character to appear, and seems like the last of an endangered species. Saskia Reeves is mesmerising in the role. She appears on stage smoking, barefoot, glittering like coal in a long black sequinned top with feathers dancing along its hem. She is white and smouldering at the same time. Her heavy blue eyeshadow makes her look bruised. She shocks her audience by loading a gun as casually as she might light a cigarette. But she needs protection. Her voice fills with unshed tears, and then empties again. Her coquettish stiletto is broken (no hope of fixing it in this store, where not a single shoe gets sold).

Carol's role in the play is emblematic of an inadmissible sexuality. Valentine (Stuart Townsend) is as wild as Carol, but is almost her opposite. He is - as his name suggests - at the heart of this play. He wears a snakeskin jacket, but he was cast out of the garden of Eden long ago. He is cool in the way you can only be if you are also damaged. He specialises in lines such as "The sight of a woman can make me walk in a hurry, but I don't think it ever made me run . . ." - delivered appropriately slowly and seductively.

But the secret of Valentine's power is more than his beauty. He has a look of unattainability and dysfunction. He is giving nothing away; his only love appears to be his guitar. He cradles it as if it were a woman. Carol brazenly tells him that she wishes she were the guitar. There is nothing she will not say. And there is nothing he will do - but his indifference changes when he meets Lady.

Lady (Helen Mirren) is the last of the wild ones. She is married to the dying owner of the shoe store, an evil man who (the gossips have already told us) was responsible for the death of her father. At first, she does not seem wild at all. She is withdrawn, dressed in black, like a widow in the making, which is exactly what she has reason to believe she is. Her brown hair is pulled tightly back; her face seems extinguished.

Mirren is a marvellously musical actress; she can change note with subtlety and grace. Here, she moves with ease from severity to gentleness, from neurotic panic to gaiety. And when Valentine first touches her, ostensibly to give her a bit of osteopathic assistance, she launches into a stream of garrulity. The tempo change is fantastically funny; she rattles on about how unusual it is for Italians to be blond and much else - to cover her swooning reaction to his touch.

Upstairs, Lady's dying husband, Jabe (Richard Durden), knocks on the floor with his walking stick. By the end, Lady has Valentine sleeping on the premises behind a curtain - with her. Her husband unexpectedly comes downstairs, and she reacts as if she were in charge of an unexploded bomb. He looks like a death's head, with green blood running in his veins. He speaks as if taking part in a menacing elocution lesson, toying with each of his syllables as a cat might play with a bird before finishing it off.

Nicholas Hytner's direction is inspired and perfectly paced: not a line of this play is lost or thrown away. Which is just as well, because all these characters have is their eloquence.

Orpheus Descending is at the Donmar Warehouse, Earlham Street, London, until 12 August (020-7369 1732)

Post your comment

Please note: you will need to login or register before you can comment on the website