Press Reviews
Financial Times
By Alastair Macaulay
Published: October 20 2006
Now that the subjugation of women has again resumed front-page status, Tennessee Williams's rare play Summer and Smoke has more social relevance than one at first assumes. But during its first half this play seems to be a minor version of something better. A well-brought-up young lady falls headlong in love with a good-looking but none too well-behaved young man. We might almost be watching Showboat or Carousel. As he grows more depraved, more doomed, and her conflict of repression and desire is ever more evident, the play seems to be a lesser version of some other play by Tennessee Williams himself.
But this is a play on a slow burn, and its final scenes are superb. It demonstrates many of the virtues that make Williams one of the supreme playwrights of the 20th century. He is the finest master of the dramatic metaphor since Ibsen (the meanings of both "summer" and "smoke" here open poetically). And he has a piercing sympathy for the emotionally fragile. The story he tells of the repressed Alma ends up quite unlike that of his other heroines. The young doctor John learns from her about soul (smoke); she learns from him about the flesh (summer). He gives her sleeping pills; she remarks to another man: "The prescription number is 96814. I think of it as the telephone number of God."
Rosamund Pike reveals in Alma a deeply affecting blend of pathos, nobility and eloquence. Beautiful and fragile in looks, she plays the role with riveting focus. She is perfectly contrasted with the American actor Chris Carmack, with his fallen- angel charm and his mixture of sensual abandon and painful embarrassment. There is more than one kind of heartbreak in this play: "All rooms are lonely where there is only one person."
The Independent
By Paul Taylor
Published: 20 October 2006
Adrian Noble's luminous, sensitive and sharp production marks the bizarrely belated London premiere of Summer and Smoke, the 1948 Tennessee Williams play that followed the sensational A Streetcar Named Desire. I have, however, seen the piece once before in England , in a 1987 staging at the Leicester Haymarket.
I think that I must have been going through a severe phase of automatic impatience with overt symbolism because my notice poured undiluted scorn on what I then saw as the play's schematic overload. A set-up whereby there's a heroine called "Alma" (the Spanish word for "soul"), who represents the spirit, and a hero equipped with a contrasting carnality and a torrid Mexican bit on the side (though, of course, he really loves Alma) was a red rag to the bull of a critic I was 20 years ago.
And a play in those days was on a hiding to absolutely nothing with me if it did things like place over the proceedings a whacking great statue of a female angel pouring water from cupped hands into a fountain.
So who says that we don't (even critics) improve with age? I still find the play a little too tightly organised, but thanks to Noble's beautiful (if for my taste a touch too slow) direction and some lovely acting by a well-cast company, I find myself struck by the ambiguities in the symbolism, the delicacy and wit of the writing and the terrible poignancy of a situation where two people, who might have been born to complement each other, instead assist, through a tragic bind, in their own mutual estrangement.
Peter McKintosh's design gives Summer and Smoke just the right kind of poetic spaciousness and slightly abstract quality. The exquisite sky, an impressionist marbling of blue and white, inundates the production and further releases the play from the confines of earthbound realism. Cleverly, he uses wooden Venetian blinds to unify the indoor action in a piece that often has to balance two locations.
Set in Glorious Hill, Mississippi in 1916 (with a prelude at the turn of the century), the play follows the intertwined fortunes of Alma (Ro sam und Pike), a clergyman's daughter, and John, a doctor's son, who is (literally speaking if in no other way) the boy next door.
Rebelling against his father, he has turned to maverick dissolution. The exquisite Pike conveys not some vague conception of ethereality, but the complicated plight of a young woman who has unfairly been left to manage a household in lieu of her mother, who has relapsed into a subversive second childhood as an opt-out from her parish responsibilities. Angela Down's superb performance of this wizened infant, gleefully trotting out secrets and repetitions, seems to c ross a tactical tot with an anarchic parrot.
Pike's Alma touches the heart with her shy, compulsive laughter in emotionally tricky situations, her defensive affectations (there are some very funny scenes with the socially poisonous literary society) and her underlying seriousness. She is splendidly partnered by handsome, subtle Chris Carmack, who lets you see hints of the idealist who is left unsatisfied by his fierce adventures with the flesh provided by Hanne Steen's sizzlingly sultry Rosa .
The death by shooting of John's stiff, righteous father initiates the process whereby Alma and John exchange positions, narrowly missing each other as they progress. John redeems himself by finishing his father's work in fighting a fever epidemic and becomes a public hero. Early in the play, a sexily skittish John had diagnosed in Alma a case of "irritated Doppelgänger". The twofold irony is that this alter ego turns out to be quite his own earlier self and that his reform is inspired by the earlier Alma .
At the end of the play, in scenes of quietly desperate sadness, she is reduced to picking up businessmen on the streets. In the final image of this expertly judged production , we see her taking a last drag on the cigarette that she has shared with a new client and flicking the butt into the angel-guarded fountain. Highly recommended.
Daily Mail
By Quentin Letts
Published: 20 October 2006
For some time now it has been clear that Rosamund Pike is one of the beauties of our age. Such porcelain-perfect poise of neck. The hint of Asia in those light-lashed eyes. A wasp’s waist, husky voice, and nicely gnarled fingers to prove she’s not too, too perfect.
But could she command a stage? A brief venture some months ago in the East End suggested not. Maybe she was just a film star, a mannequin for the camera’s slowmo’ linger.
On Wednesday night she proved this doubter completely wrong. Her performance as a parson’s daughter in early 20 th century Mississippi is one of the best things of the West End year.
Miss Pike is magnificent, imperious, brilliant, superb- throw at her every superlative in the critic’s cupboard, for all I care. In this show she’s the tops.
Tennessee Williams’ Summer and Smoke is not often performed but I can’t understand why. It is an elegy to the cruelty of frustrated love, and it shows how sometimes the virtuous path can lead to ruin, the ruinous to virtue, and how the two can fail to collide.
It is particularly interesting to see a genteel class yielding influence and eventually self-control to more barbarous, ruthless elements. How true of recent British history.
Chaste Alma , a slender 2-some-thing who wears lemon-yellow dresses and looks after her senile mother, is madly in love with hunky John (Chris Carmack, sporting an amazing coal-scuttle lower jaw). He fancies her but she won’t give him what he wants.
By the time she changes her mind he has drifted to cheaper girls. Alma ’s goodness loses her her once chance of happiness.
She shouldn’t love him but she does. Physically frail, she has a weak heart. A weak heart indeed.
A welcome dose of humour comes from Angela Down as Alam’s daft old mother, cackling with malevolence even though her feet do not touch the ground when she’s sitting on a sofa.
Kate O’ Tioole is very good as a hideous gossip called Mrs Bassett.
As for Miss Pike, she catches perfectly the restraint, the giggling anxiety, the guilty hunger of a young woman trying to live to the morals of a ‘flock of old people’. That makes Alma ’s downfall all the sadder.
Spamalot, Spamalot, Spamalot is all we seem to have heard about in recent days – proof of the grotesque power of PR. But I assure you, Summer and Smoke has been the week’s more fulfilling theatre experience.
Summer and Smoke the production :
****
‘Adrian Noble’s luminous, sensitive and sharp production .
Beautiful direction and lovely acting by a well-cast company…
highly recommended’
Independent
****
‘Subtle, strong, and packed with tantalising contradictions…
Genuinely erotic stuff’ The Times
‘A production that is never less than absorbing and well performed by everyone’
Times
****
‘Superb … Williams is the finest master of the dramatic metaphor since Ibsen’.
Financial Times
‘A soulful encounter of spirit and flesh.
Williams’ play is full of plangent poetic beauty which fully justifies revival’.
The Guardian
‘Powerfully moving… a dramatic knockout’
The Daily Telegraph
****
‘Peter McKintosh is the designer of the week…Deirdre Clancy’s costumes and Simon Lee’s brilliantly evocative musical direction
– are as good as any in the West End at the moment’
Whatsonstage.com
Michael Coveney
****
‘Adrian Noble’s beautiful, absorbing production boasts two scorching performances which keeps it at a very satisfying simmer’
Mail on Sunday
SUMMER AND SMOKE - Ro sam und Pike and Chris Carmack :
*****
‘Miss Pike is magnificent, imperious, brilliant, superb. Her performance is one of the best things of the West End year. In this show, she’s the tops. ’
The Daily Mail
****
‘The exquisite Pike splendidly partnered by handsome, subtle Chris Carmack…
an expertly judged production ’
Independent
‘Scorching performance from Ms Pike and her leading man, Chris Carmack, projecting a heat that was smokin’
Baz Bamigboye - Daily Mail
****
‘Ro sam und Pike reveals in Alma a deeply affecting blend of pathos, nobility and eloquence. Beautiful and fragile in looks, she plays the role with riveting focus. She is perfectly contrasted with the American actor Chris Carmack, with his fallen- angel charm and his mixture of sensual abandon and painful embarrassment.’
Financial Times
****
‘Enthralling …Adrian Noble’s fine production , could not be better cast…
Ro sam und Pike is a perfect Alma ’.
Michael Coveney
Whatsonstage.com
‘Carmack's powerful and intense performance’
Evening Standard
SUMMER AND SMOKE – THE Play/Tennessee Williams:
‘A modern American classic is rediscovered .
In Summer and Smoke Williams wrestles fascinatingly with sex and love.
It makes a fine match.’
Evening Standard
****
‘Tennessee Williams’ Summer and Smoke is not often performed, but I can’t understand why. It is an elegy to the cruelty of frustrated love and it show how sometime the virtuous path can lead to ruin, the ruinous to virtue, and how the two can fail to collide’
Daily Mail
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