In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel at the Charing Cross Theatre, WC2
reviewed for The Times, 13th April 2016
Image credit- Scott Rylander
Perhaps Robert Chevara’s production is primarily one for Williams aficionados but Marlowe’s performance is compelling.
Tennessee Williams’s late plays aren’t much cop, although Gene David Kirk made a good case for The Two-Character Play with Catherine Cusack at the Jermyn Street Theatre six years ago.
In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel was written as Williams descended into alcoholism in 1969 and was originally panned by critics as a half-baked exercise in cheap artistic theory. Certainly, the meanderings about primary colours (regurgitated from Hans Hofmann) are unenlightening. Yet Linda Marlowe’s taut performance as the wife of a successful, fragile artist (his ageing muse and weary babysitter) makes a fine argument for its strengths as a psychological study.
As the visiting American, Miriam, Marlowe is compelling from the off, preying hungrily on Andrew Koji’s wary barman. Yet the pace drops when David Whitworth surfaces as her quivering husband, Mark, their chemistry as unconvincing as his awkward falls on the steeply raked stage.
We’re supposed to be watching characters struggle to put their sensations into words — or paint — so they speak in truncated sentences, Williams’s experiment in the marriage of form and content. Yet listening to Marlowe and Whitworth bicker sounds more like a series of missed cues than successfully experimental staccato.
Things pick up again when Alan Turkington’s Leonard, a gay art dealer and Mark’s agent, arrives on a rescue mission. Left alone on stage at last, Marlowe again punches at the heart with a violence that surprises. If the inherent misogyny of Williams’s female portraits feels familiar, so too does his empathy with claustrophobic sexuality.
Perhaps Robert Chevara’s production is primarily one for Williams aficionados or fans of his friend Jackson Pollock (Miriam owes much to Pollock’s wife, Lee Krasner). Yet it’s good to see the once stagnant Charing Cross Theatre continue to programme challenging work under its new owners. The musical theatre visionary Thom Southerland takes over as artistic director imminently. Watch this space.
