We do like our Tennessee Williams, do Janie and I. This is a rarely performed play and I have always been fascinated by it.
Indeed, we must have been very keen to see this one, as we booked for the first Saturday of the West End run. We tend to avoid the West End these days.
We loved it. I wrote in my log:
Superb. One of the best so far this year.
Sheila Gish was predictably excellent, but we were also much taken with a young Rachel Weisz; I think this was the first time we saw her.
Whose brilliant idea was it to pair The Real Inspector Hound with Black Comedy? Well, if I’m not totally mistaken The Bear Pit at Alleyn’s School did so back in the mid 1970s. It worked well then (I shall write up The Bear Pit production in the fullness of time) and it worked well nearly 25 years later, in the late 1990s, too.
Superb evening…
…was my take on it in my log. How could it not be – what a cast! Desmond Barrit, David Tennant, Nichola McAuliffe, Sara Crowe, Anna Chancellor…and Greg Doran directing.
While The Independent previewed the event the morning after our visit wondering, over three pages, whose brilliant idea it was to pair these two short plays? (The Bear Pit at Alleyn’s School. Do you arts journos know nothing?)
Not one of Eugene O’Neill’s greatest plays, but my log suggests that Bobbie and I both found this production very good…
…and why shouldn’t we. Vanessa Redgrave & Timothy Dalton, with support from Amanda Boxer, Malcolm Tierney and several other good names. David Thacker directed it.
This was, in fact, a West End transfer of a much-lauded Young Vic production; the UK premier of this play. Bobbie and I couldn’t get in at the Young Vic but got in early during the transfer, so saw the original Young Vic cast/production.