Zoë Wanamaker in The Rose Tattoo
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Is there any period in which that master theatrical conjurer Zoë Wanamaker doesn't feel at home? She's sent poleaxing shivers of emotion down the spine in Sophocles'
Electra and traded in the classical realm for the bone-weary Depression-era ache of Clifford Odets'
Awake and Sing. And now, as if as a gift to herself—albeit in acting terms, a highly demanding gift at that—she's stepped into the reluctantly life-enhancing shoes of Serafina delle Rose in Tennessee Williams'
The Rose Tattoo, to give a performance that is itself revelatory in its open-faced, full-throated embrace of the possibility for renewal. You'll no doubt recall Serafina's plight, whether or not you fully remember the degree to which Williams' 1951 Broadway vehicle for Anna Magnani actually ends on a high. As a Sicilian at odds with a southern community that's not exactly reined-in in its racism, Serafina begins the play "heavy with life" only to soon be knocked sideways by grief: with the news of the sudden death of her husband Rosario comes the loss of the pregnant woman's unborn son, events leaving her a widow in care of the teenage Rosa (Susannah Fielding), who is busy discovering men and sex at the precise time that Serafina is closing off those options for herself.
The director is Nicholas Hytner, filling in after the truly awful death of Steven Pimlott, whose own bout with cancer is cruelly at odds with the inextinguishable life force celebrated in this text. And some exceedingly shrill work from the supporting cast notwithstanding (the daughter is pretty much unbearable), Hytner gives this distinctive American community much the same richness and clarity he brought to his depiction of small town Maine in his groundbreaking NT revival of Carousel. When he staged Orpheus Descending at the Donmar some years ago, Hytner seemed restricted by the relative limitations of that space; not so in the Olivier. Inheriting a game plan of sorts that had presumably been set forth by Pimlott, the director makes you feel the gathering isolation felt by Serafina—an exotic specimen to most of the local children; a figure of derision for the envenomed "strega," or witch (Rosalind Knight in a role she's probably too good for), and merely so much maternal oppression when it comes to her daughter, Rosa, a 15 year old who craves an assignation with a young sailor, Jack (Andrew Langtree, sporting a gold earring and tight white naval outfit), whose own libido is set against fears of landing in the clink if he has sex with a minor.
Zoë Wanamaker and Darrell D’Silva
in The Rose Tattoo
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For three years, it becomes clear, Serafina hasn't dressed: her dirty pink slip all the attire she needs from which to talk to the ashes of her beloved Rosario, which she keeps nearby in a marble urn. A dressmaker from Sicilian peasant stock, she exalts the memory—and the title ("Barone")—of her late husband, even if his title turns out to be as spurious as his loyalty to a spouse who goes from grieving wife to rampaging cuckold, the human equivalent of the horned goat that keeps intruding in on the action. (Even Edward Albee's
The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia? didn't give an actual goat this much stage time.) In a grim chain of events, it turns out that Serafina was unwittingly employed by the proverbial other woman, Estelle (Sharon Bower), to make up a shirt for her philandering husband—a trail of circumstance that has left her appalled with herself and has her own daughter calling her "disgusting."
Wanamaker, quite simply, is a marvel in a part to which her pug-nosed pugnacity could not be better matched. Remarking that "we are Sicilian and we are not cold-blooded," this Serafina sounds infinite variety in a responsiveness quick to tears but also to laughter, albeit of an alternately mocking and angry sort. And when her eyes widen in anticipation of life's bounty in the form of her second-act saviour, the truck driver Alvaro Mangiacavallo (Darrell D'Silva), you thirst for the same consummation that Serafina does; even Peter Hall's previous London revival of this same play, with Julie Walters and Ken Stott, didn't mine such deeply felt bounty from a script that, mishandled, can seem eccentric, hoary and not a little strained.
Happily, there's no strain whatsoever to D'Silva's terrifically endearing Mangiacavallo, a delightful lug with big ears and, clearly, an even bigger heart. So what if he's a reduced version of the deceased Rosario: Alvaro drives an eight-ton fruit truck as opposed to the dead man's 10-ton vehicle, and he mocks his origins whereas Rosario seemed hell-bent on ennobling his? For all intents and purposes, he's a New Man in a begrimed t-shirt, as quick to tears as Serafina and ready with "love and affection in this lonely cold world"—a balm Williams was quick to deny the characters in many of his other plays but here supplies in heartening if never sentimental abundance. Indeed, hearing remarks like "nothing is too good for a man if a man is good," you may find yourself checking the programme to see just who indeed wrote this play. What you'll find is a playwright in rare thrall to life's generosity and the capacity for rebirth, here seamlessly matched with a leading lady whose own ongoing creative renewal constitutes its own, very real source of wonder.
The Rose Tattoo
By Tennessee Williams
Directed by Nicholas Hytner and Steven Pimlott
National Theatre/Olivier