The Rose Tattoo/Camino Real [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION Penguin Plays are publisliing two more volumes of Tennessee Williams to succeed Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, one containing The Rose Tattoo with Camino Real and the other The Glass Menagerie with A Streetcar Named Desire. Mr Williams is the theatrical portent of the present time, as G.B.S. was (so very differently) of the earlier part of this century. Of all the dramatists now writing in English, Mr Williams is the one who gives the most complete theatrical experiences to his audience. One may like a play of his, or disHke it, even intensely, but one can't escape it: it exercises to the fuU the magic that is exclusive to the theatre. Mr WiUiams is a poetic realist, or rather perhaps a realistic poet. His exposure of his characters is as complete as an autopsy. But with a difference: the person who is dissected is not a dead body but a living soul, and the dramatist who reveals its pHght is also moved by it. Not only so: these lives have another dimension besides that exhibited in their material, and often sordid, individual circumstances. The poet, who conceives them in compassion, sees them luminous. He cannot help it: he is a poet, and reality is translucent to him. I have said that he 'sees' liis characters, whereas a poet, who is concerned primarily with words, might be expected rather to 'hear' them. But Mr Williams is a visual writer: this is one of the gifts which make hitn particularly of our time, for the theatre has been brought, by the effect of films and television on its audiences, to need the visual more than it used to. His imagination of the settiags of his plays works strictly in terms of the theatre - but of a theatre far more flexible than that of the naturalistic writers. By conceiving such living stage-pictures as the apartment house of The Glass Menagerie with its fire escape, or the semi-transparent building of Streetcar, he has extended our theatre's visual range. The same is true of aural rhythms, for he shows a musical composer's gift for orchestration in Ins use of the human voice and the noises of a city in counterpoint. This is perhaps more apparent in Camino Real, the least realistic of the plays, but it is no less present in the others which are Hmited to a single time-sequence and a single group of related characters.