Browse reviews

Brighton Fringe 2017

Ivan’s Widow and Talk to Me Like the Rain and Let Me Listen

Fox and Hound Theatre Company

Genre: Drama, Short Plays, Theatre

Venue: Rialto Theatre

Festival:


Low Down

Fox and Hound Theatre Company Company premiere the 1981 Ivan’s Widow adding the 1953 Talk to Me Like the Rain and Let Me Listen. Codge Crawford and Helen Fox are directed in the first by Stephen Carruthers, also responsible for spectral lighting, set and technical, and Fox for the second. Ellie Stevens supplies voices and sound.

Review

In his end lies his beginning: almost the last and first plays of Tennessee Williams yoked together before a devastating mid-period work are a must-see. Not just because Fox and Hound Theatre Company premiere the 1981 Ivan’s Widow adding the 1953 Talk to Me Like the Rain and Let Me Listen, a haunting, haunted evocation of the 1930s. Already famed for their Edinburgh Fringe sell-out 27 Wagons Full of Cotton – which plays almost directly afterwards – this company’s made a specialism of Williams. Codge Crawford and Helen Fox are directed in the first by Stephen Carruthers, also responsible for spectral lighting, set and technical, and Fox for the second. Ellie Stevens supplies voices and sound.

 

Ivan’s Widow is a curious piece. If set in 1981 when written it seems more like the 1950s. A widow wearing arcane veil and black is berated by her psychiatrist for doing so. There’s a brief contemporary reference to Vietnamese boat people as ‘dust of the earth’ which the widow feels she is. Fox plays this in a frozen then tremulous series of emotional unveilings, as if Blanche Dubois had been let out after Largaktil or some other blocking drug sends her lurching.

 

She’s in denial that her husband Ivan, a scientist with whom she worked on a cure for cancer has died of a rare disease. This much we gradually learn. The psychiatrist’s insistent she acknowledge this; she’s assaulted and locked in, sometimes appealing to the housekeeper whom the psychiatrist threatens with dismissal should she interfere. At one point she runs out, only to return with whisky from her flask.

 

On one level the psychiatrist is sheerly predatory and Crawford relishes his east coast stiletto of an accent as he menaces the tremulously layered and mentally twitching Fox. By his own admission he’s promiscuous and very aware as he tells her that the widow’s a young very sensual woman, who recounts volatile sexual feelings after Ivan’s death. She’s wearing no underwear and after one of her outbursts leaves her crashed on the floor he injects her buttock with a semi-paralysing drug. She’s also gone commando as he has.

 

There seems on one level a mute sexual complicity, on another brute abuse. The psychiatrist however seems genuinely obsessed with un-illusioning the widow in admitting Ivan’s dead, and the details emerging finally vindicate at least this truth. His own however are unstable, and the widow too is pushed into a drastic action.

 

This is an unsettling drama, Williams deliberately playing on the kind of female character he often portrayed, here shut down and self-punishing. The psychiatrist though is a curious cipher for damaged truth: a mixture of genuine concern and sexual attraction. One after all feeds the other. Should the widow recover she’s possibly no longer immune to his advances. The significance of neither wearing underwear needs possibly more than the psychiatrist’s label of her as a highly sexual woman guilty and seeking release.

 

 

Talk to Me Like the Rain and Let Me Listen

 

An unnamed couple wait out the emotional dust bowl in 1930s Midwest accents of desolation. But it’s a squalid New York hotel. A Spartan interior boasts nothing more than a bed and window quite mouldy with damp. A younger woman feels utterly abandoned by her man, to the point of ritual. He’s often called on to obscure jobs that leave him ‘passed around like a dirty postcard’ and tossed away. One day he finds himself waking naked on a bed of ice in a bath. He’s returned to tell her this.

 

After she vents her frustration he asks her to name a fantasy life she’d live if she could. He repeats ‘Talk to Me Like the Rain and Let Me Listen.’ It’s an incantation. She recounts living twenty-five then fifty years anonymously in a hotel with virtually no human contact. It’s a dream-like aspiration recounted as if in a trance. It’s heard like a surreal prayer too, framed by a surreal request. But it’s in another way hyper-realist.

 

Crawford releases a more hopelessly tender, baffled character from the Mississippi Delta here, stripped and vulnerable; and Fox’s woman inhabits a more grounded hopelessness than some Williams heroines. If Fox tenders her desolation, Crawford here almost matches her in his delicacy and hollowed-out desire to reach out. Fox’s final words are more than poignant; they enter a plea, or rending prayer.

 

Beautifully crafted performances, these rare Williams plays deserve packed houses and Fox and Hound themselves accolades for putting on three Williams plays in one night and proving a special attunement to them all.

 

Ivan’s Widow and Talk to Me Like the Rain and Let Me Listen

 

In his end lies his beginning: almost the last and first plays of Tennessee Williams yoked together before a devastating mid-period work are a must-see. Beautifully crafted performances, these rare Williams plays deserve packed houses and Fox and Hound themselves accolades for putting on three Williams plays in one night and proving a special attunement to them all.

Published