Did Critics Throw Bouquets at Zoë Wanamaker in The Rose Tattoo?

Zoë Wanamaker in The Rose Tattoo

Here’s a sampling of what they had to say:

Matt Wolf in his Theatre.com Review:"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… 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."

Zoë Wanamaker and Darrell D’Silva in The Rose Tattoo

Michael Billington in The Guardian: “It was Sam Wanamaker who first introduced Tennessee Williams's play to England in 1958; and now his daughter, Zoë, gives a spectacularly fine performance in it. So fine, indeed, that it both honours the memory of the late Steven Pimlott, who started a production completed by Nicholas Hytner, and gives the illusion the play is better than it is…But, while one applauds the play's affirmation of life and Williams's sly humour, the exposition is lazy, the rose-symbolism wildly excessive and the parallels between Serafina and her daughter, who finally conquers an improbably virginal sailor, over-contrived…Williams created a great character in Serafina that produces from Zoë Wanamaker the performance of her career. What she captures brilliantly are Serafina's contradictions…Wanamaker unforgettably gives us a woman in whom passion is always at war with Catholicism and observation of the social niceties…Darrell D'Silva is excellent as this amiable hulk filled with suppressed sexual longing: watching his hands trace the outline of Wanamaker's well-contoured body is a delight in itself and a reminder of Williams's own comic instinct…Susannah Fielding also makes the most of Serafina's mewed-up daughter ardently in pursuit of the least-likely sailor in dramatic history…But the play is worth seeing for Wanamaker whose Serafina is the embodiment of comic vitality.”
Dominic Cavendish in The Daily Telegraph: “Nicholas Hytner, filling the shoes of a longtime friend, could have paid no greater tribute than the production that he has brought, apparently untroubled and wholly delightful, to the stage. For Serefina delle Rose, the grieving dress-maker widow in Tennessee Williams's 1950 play, however, time comes to a complete standstill: there is no period of mourning long enough to do justice to her deceased husband, a truck driver who was a pillar of the local Sicilian community - sometimes for illicit reasons - and a stallion in the bedroom…Serefina determines that she will never give her heart to another man - and insists that her daughter, Rosa, remains chaste too…It's a mark of just how great an actress Zoë Wanamaker is that she negotiates the play's uneasy mixture of laughter and tears, absurdity and poignancy without showing the slightest strain - the force-field of her personality holds the contradictions in place.Wanamaker, moving from confident womanhood, through a passage of ignominy as the local laughing-stock, before finally reviving in the redemptive, hunky presence of Darrell D'Silva's Alvaro, is the imperative reason to see this…production…Most of the other characterisations are broader than the Mississippi, teetering on caricature.”