Cock Tavern, London
You have to admire the enterprise of this tiny north-London pub theatre. In celebration of the centenary of Tennessee Williams's birth, it has staged no less than two world premieres. But the second of them turns out to be a slight, hour-long piece of far greater biographical than dramatic interest: what it proves is that Williams never forgave his mother's role in sanctioning the pre-frontal lobotomy carried out on his beloved sister, Rose.
Williams sets his play in a swank Manhattan mansion where the delusional Nance, apparently in her early 30s, lives like an imprisoned child. But while her mother and a rich chum go off for a date with male escorts, Nance, who is left alone with a churlish child-minder, communes with an apparition of the great Russian dancer Nijinsky. For Nance, Nijinsky is not just an embodiment of her sexual fantasies, but a kindred artistic spirit and a fellow schizophrenic.
It's not too difficult to see how Williams has hewn the play from his own experience. His heroine is clearly an amalgam of his institutionalised sister and his young artistic self, whom his father dismissively dubbed "Miss Nancy". And Nance's mother is a savagely parodic inversion of the real-life Edwina Dakin Williams, whose aristocratic gentility is transformed into a crude carnality. But this, for me, is the problem. Whereas, in his finest work, Williams is aware of the comic absurdity of almost everyone, here he confronts us with a stark choice. You're either a suffering soul like Nance or Nijinsky, who claims "God loves the artist", or else you are a crudely earthbound philistine like Nance's mum and her coarse chum. The play feels more like a personal revenge-drama than an exploration of the human predicament.
But, even if it makes for thin drama, Gene David Kirk's production does everything possible to give it life. Caitlin Thorburn's Nance suggests a strong sexual impulse behind her Alice in Wonderland dress and views Sam Marks's Nijinsky, who impressively dances a section of L'Après-Midi d'un Faune on this pocket-handkerchief stage, with the right studied fascination. Gillian Hanna also has a few nice moments as the indignant child-minder but there is no way that Janet Prince and Lucinda Curtis can prevent the two elderly pleasure-seekers, one of whom talks of "the warm, salty juice of a young lover's loins", seem anything more than a pair of caricatures. It's an evening, I'd suggest, mainly for the most ardent Williams devotees.