Glasgay! Does Tennessee: Short Plays with a Williams Theme

Perhaps the most exciting parts of the Tennessee Williams’ festival will be the new works fluttering around the margins, as modern writers and performers take on the swamp ghost of the southern master. While the classics retain their old charm and verve, it is in the new, commissioned works that Glasgay! comes to life, testing the boundaries between queer and mainstream taste, and allowing ideas about Williams’ place in the canon to be fully explored.

Elysian Fields, Derek McLuckie’s take on Williams’ final decline, is a suitably hallucinogenic romp, capturing Williams' mania for love, life, drink and drugs in patches of visionary prose and frantic performances. Aside from much chimping about from the chorus of pretty boys and scientists, and a few unnecessarily camp songs, McLuckie filters the sad last days through an almost Blakean vision, with the spirit of Vivien Lee/Blanche DuBois taunting Williams in his cups and on his pills. McLuckie himself gets the star turn, as an uber-version of Williams’ moma, a southern belle who was faking all along. This vibrant - and in the fusion of kitsch and intense melodrama, very Glaswegian – interpretation does linger on the glamour of drug abuse and the aging artist, without losing sight of its ultimate tawdry futility.

The other new work, Barry Henderson’s A Slow Dissolve is both short and personal – although it seems slightly insincere. The most interesting parts of this one man show feature Henderson’s meditations on failed relationships and heavy drinking: he might share these with Tennessee, but so does the rest of Glasgow. The brief doll show version of Streetcar is funny, but forced. It is as if he converted a one-person show into a Williams memoir with a brief, additional scene. He sheds little light on the influence of Williams in his life – or how he might be relevant to a modern gay man. However, on its own, A Slow Dissolve is bittersweet and convincing, a fine example of the confessional performance that is dominating the Live Art genre these days.

Drew Taylor’s decision to fuse two unrelated plays adds a little to both The Chalky White Substance and The Municipal Abattoir, but hardly rescues them from being minor works. Williams was not a great formal experimenter, and Chalky White is poor Beckett gone sci-fi, Abattoir is Kafka gone too political. Confidently performed and staged, they lack the richness of Williams’ most famous and effective plays. The scripts take themselves far too seriously, and make a single point quickly and gracelessly. As part of a festival, they are interesting and illuminate the playwright’s concerns and personality. They are never destined to be anymore than this, sadly.

Catching these works as a celebration of Tennessee Williams undoubtedly lends them power and interest, spurring debate and expanding the public appreciation of the range of his work and his influence. It is also interesting to note that the audiences differ between productions: A Slow Dissolve called in the Live Art fans, while at the Citizens, The Parade called in a very different crowd. If nothing else, Tennessee Williams does show how eclectic Glasgay! has become.