Night of the Iguana

“Oh, God, can’t we stop now? Finally? Please let us,” asks Jenny Seagrove’s spinster painter Hannah Jelkes, and at the end of nearly three hours of Tennessee Williams’ frequently highly charged but intermittently lethargic 1961 play Night of the Iguana, you know exactly how she feels. But that’s no criticism: rather, it’s the relief of being released, at last, from the collective grip of desperation that seems to infect almost every character here, just as the iguana that has been caught and shackled below the patio finally achieves its own freedom.

Last seen in London at the National Theatre in a Richard Eyre production in 1992, when it was given in the published three-act version, the play is now staged for the first time in the UK in the two-act “acting” edition that Williams prepared for the 1961 Broadway premiere. But, as the running time indicates, it still makes for a dense (and dramatically intense) evening.

The action is set in 1940 on the thatch-canopied terrace of a Mexican holiday hotel, presided over by the newly-widowed Maxine Faulk (Clare Higgins). The place is at once refuge and relief for an assortment of oddballs. As well as the aforementioned destitute painter and her 97-year-old grandfather poet (John Franklyn-Robbins) that she looks after, it’s also here that the defrocked priest-turned-tour guide Larry Shannon (Woody Harrelson) brings a party from the Baptist Female College in Texas, deviating from their set itinerary that party leader Judith Fellowes (Nichola McAuliffe) strongly objects to – though she objects even more strongly to the affair that Shannon has begun with one of the group, Charlotte Goodall (Jenna Harrison).

Also present are a pair of German visitors (Peter Banks and Nancy Baldwin), rejoicing in the news of London’s burning at the hands of the Fuhrer, and a couple of Mexican hotel workers (handsomely embodied by Federico Zanni and Simon Kassianides).

Thus the stage is set for a typically bruising Williams’ journey into the dark night of the soul (and soul-searching) that has brought them there, particularly in the central duo of the alcoholically damaged Shannon and the kindred spirit of loneliness and kindness he finds in the spinster artist. Harrelson – last seen on the London stage three years ago in On an Average Day, that was very much a very average play – is is able to make a far darker, more dangerous impression this time. Seagrove, with her fractured voice and tall, elegant reserve, projects a moving vulnerability as Hannah.

But the play is stolen by two bravura turns. First, from the feisty, brassy Higgins – who segues effortlessly from appearing as Mrs Loman in the Lyric’s last tenant, Death of a Salesman – to now offer a sizzling display of sensuality and sexuality as the hotel landlady. And second, from McAuliffe as the boomingly uptight tour party leader.

– Mark Shenton