Spring Storm

Synopsis

'The curtain rises to reveal a high, windy bluff over the Mississippi River. It is called Lover’s Leap. On the verge are two old trees whose leafless branches have been grotesquely twisted by the winds. Heavenly enters. She has the natural and yet highly developed charm that is characteristic of girls of pure southern stock. Her nature is confusing to herself and to all who know her.' Heavenly has almost everything a young woman could desire - beauty, charm and a host of male admirers. And one Spring she is forced to decide between her handsome and wild lover, Dick, and the respectable and sensitive Arthur. Her actions will have consequences for both her debt ridden family and other young people in the town, as they are all caught up in a storm that threatens to tear their lives apart.

Our Review:

Michael Coveney - 26 October 2009

Spring Storm is an early three-act play by Tennessee Williams that is unknown, unpublished, never before seen in Europe – and much, much more than a collection of sketches for the later plays.

Hats off, then, to director Laurie Sansom and his team at the Royal & Derngate, for presenting the piece in tandem with the slightly less unknown Beyond the Horizon by [Eugene O’Neill] (to be reviewed later) in the gorgeous Victorian Royal auditorium.

Williams wrote this play while studying at Iowa University in 1937, the same year as his sister Rose was subjected to a pre-frontal lobotomy (there’s a reference to “dementia praecox” in young women). A university professor dismissed it airily: “Well, we all have to paint our nudes.”

Williams did in fact supply an alternative striptease ending, but Sansom sticks with the more conventional, touching conclusion in which Liz White’s delightfully attractive and...

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