The Rose Tattoo: Tennessee Williams’ vision slips away as comic hilarity replaces sexual seduction

The Rose Tattoo

The Complex

★★☆☆☆

Tennessee Williams’ searing exploration of sexual mores is given a contemporary flavour in a new stage adaptation that seeks to place the traditions of Traveller culture centre stage.

Vanessa Fielding and Catherine Joyce relocate the drama from southern Mississippi to a halting site in modern Ireland, where Sarah (Denise McCormack) has retreated into her mobile home after the sudden death of her husband.

Williams’ work is known for its rarefied, heightened atmospheres, and for the limpid poetry and smooth cadence of his southern American voice. Fielding and Joyce add a demotic clarity to the dialogue, with an emphasis on earthy expression rather than lyrical beauty, bringing an immediacy to the soap-operatic scenario, whose preoccupation with sexual morality might seem remote from modern sensibilities.

The real conflict that Fielding and Joyce find in Williams’ play, however, is the conflict between generations. Sex is only one danger that the world outside the halting site offers. Drugs, violence and gambling threaten the lives of Traveller men and impact the future of their wives and children, as evidenced by the fate of both Sarah’s husband and the lover she eventually takes on. Education threatens to take Sarah’s daughter Rose away (a fine performance from Shauna Higgins), offering her opportunities that her mother cannot understand.

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Fielding uses the warehouse space well, with characters moving through the audience and behind the seats to add an immersive energy to performances, which are mostly good. Christine Collins and Bairbre Ní Chaoimh in particular distinguish themselves in the supporting cast.

Although there is some troubling doubling of minor characters that the production cannot pull off, as well as some curious inconsistencies – the atmospheric live score from Paddy Keenan is entirely absent from the second half. Sabine Dargent’s ramshackle halting site set, meanwhile, features dresses suspended from the ceiling like corpses, echoing the threat of suicide that simmers under the surface of the plot.

[ The Rose Tattoo: ‘There will be women in the audience cringing that these things are even talked about’ ]

And yet, the harder Fielding and Joyce work to make Williams’ play accessible, the more ridiculous it seems. As the key sexual seduction is stripped of any sense of real passion, comic hilarity fills the void instead, and the fragile “spun glass” otherworldliness of Williams’ unique theatrical vision slips away.

The Rose Tattoo runs until May 20th The Complex, see complex.ie