Finding the Way: The Evolution of Tennessee Williams's Vieux Carre

Abstract

Of the numerous plays written in the later portion of Tennessee Williams’s prolific career, perhaps the most satisfying and undoubtedly the most favorably received was the 1978 British production of Vieux Carre, directed by Keith Hack, presented first at Nottingham Playhouse (16 May 1978) and later in London at the Piccadilly Theatre (9 August 1978). The British staging came a year after the play’s disastrous Broadway premiere. “What was potentially strongest in this chamber-music play of time, place, and memory has been botched by inept direction,” noted T. E. Kalem in Time magazine, and Walter Kerr in the New York Times indicted the director for what he termed an “irresponsible production” (5), suggesting that the play be given another staging with different personnel. He concluded his review: “I’m game for a second go” (30). The British production proved to be the “second go” that Kerr had championed, and under Keith Hack’s direction it emerged as a major success, evoking comparison with A Streetcar Named Desire and The Glass Menagerie. Michael Coveney’s review in the Financial Times was a rave: “Mr Williams returns to the London stage in blistering form [with] a wonderfully crafted and deeply moving piece.” Ned Chaillet in The Times (London) claimed Williams “back in control as a writer, playing the stage like a musical instrument with rapid shifts of mood.” Robert Cushman in The Observer provided one of the most telling critiques: “‘Vieux Carre’ is also a tribute—maybe an unconscious one—to a form of stagecraft long in disuse but still potent: the theatre of Elia Kazan, where music faded in and out at the precise atmospheric moment . . . and characters moved effortlessly into pools of light with retrospective intent. In Keith Hack’s loving production (there’s a phrase I never expected to write) it is served by actors obviously overjoyed to have, for once, something to act.” Vieux Carre’s London production proved a high-water mark in Williams’s late career, and his appreciation of the contribution made by his director-collaborator is attested to in the dedication of the published text: “Inscribed to Keith Hack.” A posthumous 1983 chamber theater revival at the WPA in New York City further demonstrated the play’s con