Talk To Me Like the Rain and Let Me Listen ...

Little Theatre, Dundee

Neil Cooper

A quartet of rarely-seen short plays by Tennessee Williams isn't the obvious choice for Dundee Rep Ensemble's fifth annual tour of the city's community venues. In director Irene Macdougall's hands, however, Williams' sad little studies of little lives in everyday crisis are revealed to be as rich in poetry and poignancy as his full-length works.

Opening with the compendium's title piece, the self-destructive urges of the play's damaged young couple, played by Thomas Cotran and Millie Turner, are captured in a series of desperate exchanges that sees them finally cling to each other for comfort.

Like them, all of Williams' characters create elaborate fictions for themselves in order to survive the madness of the world beyond the bare floorboards and shabby rooms of Leila Kalbassi's set.

Punctuated by a melancholy piano score, the plays contain a contemporary currency too that speaks variously about art, addiction and abuse.

In Mr Paradise, Turner's literary groupie comes calling on John Buick's clapped-out poet who she wishes to reintroduce to the world.

Auto-da-Fe finds the sight of a dirty picture opening something up inside pious Eloi he's unable to contain, even as his mother, played by Ann Louise Ross, looks on with disapproval.

Cotran and Turner fully come into their own in This Property is Condemned as Tom and Willie, a pair of teenagers playing on the rail-track.

Dressed in a vivid purple dress and spinning increasingly troubling yarns as she clutches on to her doll, Turner gives a performance that is as truthful as it is grotesque.

An emotionally charged evening of miniature masterpieces.