Tennessee Williams

A Streetcar Named Desire

Incredibly dynamic, exhilarating and edgy production from Scottish Ballet

Early on in Scottish Ballet’s audacious adaptation of A Streetcar Named Desire it hits home just how persuasively Tennessee Williams’ play has been adapted for non-verbal storytelling. Director Nancy Meckler and choreographer Annabelle Lopez Ochoa have…

Scottish Ballet tackle A Streetcar Named Desire

Behind the scenes at new ballet based on Tennessee Williams play

Stanley Kowalski eases his muscles in around the thin body of the woman who will become his wife. Flirting with her, he pulls her handbag from her lap, wears it on one casually extended foot, a powerful, teasing predator. Behind her eyes, a light…

Vieux Carré

Bold, intelligent and intermittently entertaining play

The Wooster Group pulls apart Tennessee Williams’ late play set in a New Orleans boarding house and painstakingly reassembles it, adding references to the work of Warhol collaborator Paul Morrissey’s avant-garde films of the 60s and 70s and the work of…

Vieux Carré

The Wooster Group returns to Edinburgh with this typically inventive new take on Tennessee Williams autobiographical play set in a dilapidated boarding house in the French Quarter of New Orleans. The production draws on the improvisational films of…

New York stories: The Sun Also Rises and Vieux Carré hit Edinburgh 2010

Elevator Repair Service and Wooster Group head up International Festival

If the world of theatre was like a finely crafted china shop, then two very impressive bulls are preparing to charge at this year’s International Festival. As leaders of the experimental pack, Elevator Repair Service and the Wooster Group perform, not…

The Glass Menagerie

The Glass Menagerie opens with an address from Tennessee Williams, masquerading as the play’s central character, Tom Wingfield. ‘I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion,’ he says, an idea that Shared Experience’s touring production has…

Boom!

(PG) 112min (Second Sight) Joseph Losey’s gloriously odd 1968 melodrama starring the then married Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor resurfaces after news of its demise were exaggerated (rumour had it that only one print of it existed in the world).

Glasgay! - Steven Thomson interview

2009 will be both one of Glasgay!’s best and most troubled years. The programme is stronger than ever, but as Glasgay! has grown in its cultural importance it has attracted new levels of criticism and controversy that now threaten to undermine its…

Suddenly Last Summer

Tennessee Williams’ Suddenly Last Summer is the theatrical equivalent of a shot in the arm from a hypodermic needle, a visceral cocktail of madness, repressed sexuality and cannibalism all played out against the sweltering New Orleans heat. It’s also…

A Slow Dissolve

NEW WORK Last year, Barry Henderson’s first play, the Edward Hopper-inspired A Pleasant Kind of Loneliness, impressed critics when it premiered at the Arches. A Slow Dissolve, his new commission from Glasgay!, could well be the sleeper star of…

Tennessee Williams at Glasgay!

It’s been Scotland’s biggest and best queer event for fifteen years. Now Glasgay! is reaching out to the mainstream crowd, Jasper Hamill discovers, with the help of one of America’s greatest playwrights.

A brief history of Tennessee Williams

The life of Tennessee Williams reads like one of his plays. Born in Columbus, Mississippi, his childhood was marred by an illness that paralysed his legs for two years, a period during which his mother gave him a typewriter and encouraged him to write.

Glasgay! - Tennessee Williams

Some years ago, I attended a conference where a debate about the work of Tennessee Williams came very nearly to blows. The bone of contention involved Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, in which the character Brick confesses an attraction to a friend that surpasses…

The Glass Menagerie

MODERN CLASSIC Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, until Sat 9 Feb For all its insight into character and human emotion, Tennessee Williams’ earliest hit is perhaps the least of his major plays, with the excesses of sentiment in the text too often…