'The bird that I hope to catch in the net of this play is ... the true quality of experience in a group of people, that cloudy, flickering, evanescent - fiercely charged! - interplay of live human beings in the thundercloud of a common crisis.' Who among our contemporary playwrights would dare pen anything so shamelessly romantic? Who would even want to? Certainly not our Brenton-and-Hare political puritans, nor yet our Ayckbourn-and-Frayn tragicomedians. Poverty, disease and disability we encounter in abundance, but as the occasion for either morbidity or schmaltz. The slow but sure revival of interest in Tennessee Williams - this summer Harold Pinter directing Sweet Bird of Youth, and brilliantly - suggests a general awareness that there may currently be a hole where our theatre's heart should be.

LRB 5 September 1985 | PDF Download