The Rose Tattoo

The late Steven Pimlott had begun work on The Rose Tattoo when he finally succumbed to illness earlier this year. As agreed, Nicholas Hytner took over the production. The result is a glorious, life-affirming account of a big, bustling sentimental tragic-comedy that fills the Olivier stage and frames a tremendous performance by Zoe Wanamaker as Serafina delle Rose, the Gulf Coast dressmaker.

Williams wrote the play – first performed in 1950 and first played in this country with Sam Wanamaker, Zoe’s father, as Alvaro Mangiacavallo, Serafina’s sexual salvation – as a tribute to Sicily in general and his partner, Frank Merlo, in particular. For Williams, the rose was an image of male sexuality and the rose tattoo symbolic of the penis. Merlo was nicknamed “Little Horse” which explains why Alvaro’s surname suggests the author might want to eat one.

All of this, and much other coded iconography, is subsumed in the sheer vitality of the story, which is released on the Olivier stage at full pelt, buoyed up by Mark Thompson’s revolving design of Serafina’s house and veranda, and by Jason Carr’s insinuating, tango-based score, which cleverly links the action across several years.

Serafina is waiting for her banana truck-driving husband to come home from his latest, and last, drug-smuggling assignment. His murder sends her into a flat spin of despair which transmutes into sexual neediness. She loses the baby she was expecting. She locks up her daughter Rosa (Susannah Fielding) when she discovers she is dating a sailor. And she takes a commission to make a pink silk shirt for a neighbour’s lover without knowing that the lover was her own husband.

She becomes a recluse in a community of nosy, gossiping women, scampering children, a village witch known as the Strega (Rosalind Knight) and even a big black goat who looked suspiciously like a big black ram to me. This dimension of the production – the play was once described as “Lorca with jokes” - could have been noisier and dirtier, perhaps, but the scene is well set for Alvaro to burst through Serafina’s torpor: she recognises her husband’s body with the new head of a clown.

No dramatist other than Williams would combine realism and metaphor in such a character, who is also a banana truck driver with a rose tattoo on his chest. Alvaro is both a new man and the old one brought back to life, and Darrell D'Silva plays the poignancy of this with a wonderful, brutish, wide-eyed simplicity. His scenes with Wanamaker, as the accidental encounter slides towards a permanent relationship, are rich in comedy and mutual discovery.

Wanamaker makes a journey from sexual rapture to sluttish isolation with utter conviction. She gets in a hilarious tangle of discarded underwear when she tries to squeeze into a dress for her daughter’s graduation ceremony, and notes with unwitting approval the trim figure of the sailor she is trying vainly to keep out of the girl’s life.

Prodded along by the ministrations of Maggie McCarthy’s wise old Assunta and the timid disapproval of Nicolas Chagrin’s local priest, she slowly comes alive again, leaving the stage with an exultant cry of “Vengo, vengo, amore!” It is a climax that has been won the hard way and richly deserved, and it celebrates Pimlott’s memory and illustrious career with a perfect, joyful aptness.

- Michael Coveney