SUMMER AND SMOKE was first performed in America at the Music Box theatre on Broadway in 1948.  The play was subsequently revived off Broadway and then made into the 1961 film starring Geraldine Page, Laurence Harvey and Rita Moreno and and was nominated for four Academy Awards.  SUMMER AND SMOKE first opened in the UK in November 1951 at the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith starring Margaret Johnston and William Sylvester and directed by Peter Grenville.

Set in a small insular town in the Deep South, this is a gripping and romantic drama of smouldering and repressed passion. Rosamund Pike plays Miss Alma, a woman who struggles to forge a connection with the man she has always loved – the handsome, dissolute son of the town’s respected doctor, played by Chris Carmack. In the process, lives are changed forever in a way that none of those involved could have predicted.

Tennessee Williams is arguably the greatest American playwright of the 20th century and twice winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1948 for a Street Car Names Desire and in 1955 for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. In addition, The Glass Menagerie (1945) and The Night of the Iguana (1961) received the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best New Play.

SUMMER AND SMOKE will be directed by Adrian Noble who was Artistic Director of the Royal Shakespeare Company from 1990 to 2003. His most recent theatre productions include The Home Place by Brian Friel at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin and in the West End, Brand by Ibsen starring Ralph Fiennes, Pericles at The Roundhouse in Stratford and in the West End, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang at The London Palladium starring Michael Ball and A Woman Of No Importance for Stanhope Productions. 

Summer and Smoke is a traditional Tennessee Williams play, in that it is set in the South, has at its centre a damaged female character, and deals with the contrast between sex and sensibility. It is also typically strong, involving and memorable.

Summer and Smoke, which-literally-has fireworks of its own, is in itself an engaging, poignant drama whose central characters, though very much of their time, location and class, nonetheless speak to us, half a world away and some sixty years after it was written.

The central character, Miss Alma, is a genteel spinster of a nervous disposition, who battles with a mother whose selfishness and inability to cope with the real world has morphed into a mild form of insanity.

Mental illness was a shadow on Tennessee Williams' own family-his sister Rose was considered sufficiently ill to be lobotomised. In Summer and Smoke, Williams shows just how much stress the presence of an ill member of the family can cast on those in a position of care, and we sympathise with Miss Alma when she eventually rounds on her mother.

Miss Alma's own nervous sensibility never degenerates into madness, but the fact that her mother's did is an ever-present concern, just as his sister's condition was in Tennessee Williams' own life. A more immediate, and just as painful, worry for Miss Alma is her lack of a love life-either physical or emotional. Trapped as she is, some fifty years before the advent of the 1960s and the Permissive Society, Miss Alma's world is one where sex outside marriage-even, by implication, in courtship-is considered unrespectable, if not downright dirty. There seems to be no halfway house between Miss Alma's fear of sex-expressed as a desire for a 'higher' form of love-and Miss Nellie's nymphomania.

Added to the general pressure of society, which was far harder on adolescent female sexuality than on that of teenage boys, Miss Alma also has to cope with the embarrassment of her mother's madness and her preacher father's religious moralising.

In the years before and during World War I, the period in which Summer and Smoke is set, it was not uncommon for a young couple who did finally make it to the marriage altar never to have had sex before. So Miss Alma's reticence and confusion about it, though very marked, was not nearly as unusual or repressed for a girl of her age and background as it would have been in the 1920s, let alone today.

This is an important point to make, as Tennessee Williams has created, in Miss Alma, not a grotesque, or a fool, but a mildly neurotic, entirely believable young woman whose tragedy is wholly understandable, and due as much to her circumstances as to any character flaw.

For Summer and Smoke is a tragedy, albeit one without the set-rattling showdowns of some of Tennessee's other plays. Miss Alma's love for John, her young neighbour, is entirely rational, for he is, despite seeming to belong to another, freer, more raffish world, potentially in reach. Similarly, John, an amiable rogue with lashings of charm and the good looks (and money) to get away with his wilder behaviour, is also only just a few steps away from happiness, if only it were not for his own flaws, which are a mirror image of Miss Alma's.

There are (with the possible exception of Miss Alma's mother) no real villains here. Just damaged people trying to make sense of life. It is part of Tennessee Williams' genius that, in this relatively neglected but extraordinarily moving, often very funny, well-crafted play, we, the audience, are on the edges of our seats, desperately willing Miss Alma and John to see that their future lies with each other. Whether they finally make it, you'll see tonight.