Kingdom of Earth

Synopsis

This savage, sexy and comic play is set in the 1960s in a decrepit farm house on the edge of the Mississippi Delta, a few hours before the valley is due to be flooded. A battle between two brothers, Lot and Chicken, over the inheritance of the farmhouse, becomes a battle for the affections of Lot’s new wife, Myrtle.

Our Review:

Michael Coveney - 5 May 2011

A 1968 play Tennessee Williams called his “funny melodrama” is a good deal better, in this intense revival by Lucy Bailey, than I remember it at Hampstead Theatre many moons ago, directed, weirdly, by the choreographer Kenneth MacMillan.

At that time, shortly after Williams’s death in 1983, there was a prevalent critical orthodoxy about these messy, sometimes undramatic character studies dating from the playwright’s self-confessed “stoned age.” They were no good.

But Bailey suggests a new vivacity in this bald tale of a dying transvestite, Lot, returning to the family farmhouse in the flood-threatened Mississippi Delta with a new bride, Myrtle; his plan is to wrest the property from his half-caste half-brother, Chicken, and redeem some notion of his mother’s spiritual aristocracy.

Designer Ruth Sutcliffe fills the acting area with huge grey slurry, a mini-mountain of lava, as though on Lanzarote: the flood and ...

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Latest User Review

Gareth James - 10 May 2011:

A rare Tennessee Williams for this somewhat muted centenary year and one of the most in-your-face shows I’ve ever been to; I left exhausted. It’s a late play with nothing like the power of his classics, but better than many of his late plays. It’s a three-hander with all the usual TW themes and trademarks. Sick brother (clearly gay, but unsaid) on his last legs returns to family home with recent bride (who he met and married on TV in a day!). Before he left, following the death of his mother (they were devoted to each other), he willed the family home to his neanderthal mixed race half-brother. The marriage is a threat to neanderthal man, it has yet to be consummated and husband is now outed as cross-dresser (as his mother!). There’s sexual tension between neanderthal man and sexually frustrated new wife, who flaunts herself in her showbiz outfits. This is all against the backdrop of an imminent flood in the Mississippi Delta. It’s a bit TW-by-numbers, so you can fill in the rest yourself. The set is extraordinary (designer Ruth Sutcliffe), with a giant mound of earth reaching to the ceiling and dominating the room (as it started, my companion said ‘are you sure it’s not Beckett?!), but I’m not sure such an impressionistic setting serves the play well. The acting is appropriately ‘OTT Deep South’, but is occasionally pushed too far, particularly by Joseph Drake (though in all fairness his is a tough role to get right). David Stursazker was particularly impressive as half-brother Chicken and Fiona Glascott did well to balance Myrtle’s absurdity with her humanity. I really did find it too in-your-face; it prevents you from engaging with the characters and their stories, erases whatever realism existed and makes the experience of watching the play somewhat overpowering and uncomfortable – but maybe that’s what director Lucy Bailey intended. My companion was clearly having a dreadful time, which made me reflect that you’re better off in the theatre on your own when you’re experience isn’t contaminated by someone else’s experience. The Print Room is a good new venue (though a bit of a schlep for those of us with SW postcodes) and as a TW fan, it was good to catch up with the play....

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