Feast of raw drama

TENNESSEE Williams is in the air. At least he would have been if he hadn't been grounded by snow in a blizzard-stricken Connecticut. Now Scottish fans of this most autobiographical and fearlessly emotional of great American playwrights will have a small feast of just two productions of his work within a single month instead of a blow-out on the expected three.

The cancellation - or temporary delay - of New York's Circle in the Square company and its production of Williams's Suddenly Last Summer, which should have played Glasgow's Tramway next month, still leaves us with Dundee Rep's production of The Glass Menagerie, opening on Friday, and the Glasgow Citizens' Theatre's revival of the playwright's little-known later work, In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel, at the end of February.

A statistical fluke perhaps, but coming after a highly-rated London production of The Glass Menagerie, directed by Sam Mendes and starring Zoe Wanamaker, now running until March in the West End, and after the recent publication of the well-thought-of biography Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams by Lyle Leverich, it does seem that the playwright has come back into fashion.

``Tennessee Williams has always been in our air,'' says Giles Havergal, artistic director of the Citizens' Theatre, who made his Glasgow debut in 1969 with The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Any More (a play that was staged again last year by Philip Prowse with Rupert Everett starring) as well as overseeing productions of A Streetcar Named Desire, Camino Real, and Sweet Bird of Youth.

``He's always been a favourite of ours, but one of the things that perhaps makes him fashionable now is that a lot of what he does is very gothic. The emotional exposure and the fact that he writes obsessively does put people off, but his time may be coming again because there are now so many movies and so much that is very gothic that we have an interest in his gothic touch - old ladies marooned in Ischia writing their memoirs as they die of cancer assailed by beautiful young men . . .''

Richard Baron, directing Williams's most accessible play, The Glass Menagerie at Dundee Rep, agrees that 50 years after publication the playwright's work has a new-found modishness. ``We did a run where David Tennant, playing Tom, became very moody and aggressive,'' he says. ``It suddenly became like Rebel Without a Cause, the disaffected teenager was coming through. That's very trendy.

``What theatre's got to sell these days is its theatre-ness; it's different to film and television and what's nice about Williams, because he began as a film scriptwriter, is that he's got a lot of film techniques and also an odd cross-over into theatricality. I thought it might come across as being old-fashioned but the fact that it's so theatrical is actually the point - the way to escape life is to enter these fantasy worlds.''

Born in Columbus, Mississippi in 1911, two decades after Eugene O'Neill, four years before Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams went through a period of broken university education and casual employment, scoring small literary successes with poems, short stories, and plays, until in 1944 the production of The Glass Menagerie hit Broadway and brought him financial rewards and critical acclaim. It ran for 561 performances in New York and won the Drama Critics' Circle Award, opening in London in 1948 where it was directed by John Gielgud.

A prolific writer throughout his life (one of the few playwrights whose stage directions are worth reading for the unexpected tangents in which they head off), Williams scored further hits with A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), The Rose Tattoo (1951), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), Sweet Bird of Youth (1959) and The Night of the Iguana (1961), but by the 1970s themes that the playwright had once dealt with delicately were becoming overstated and his work was met with increasing public and critical indifference.

Giles Havergal agrees that much of Williams's later output is best left alone, but like A Song at Twilight, the late Noel Coward he unearthed in the autumn, In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel is one that stands up. ``It is working over his obsessions in different ways and coming to some rather different conclusions,'' he says about the play, written in 1969, which will be directed by Philip Prowse in the Circle Studio with Ellen Sheean in the lead role. ``I think it's always interesting to go through the later works, or indeed the early works, of famous people. Williams was haunted by the fact that he never had another great success. To be honest I have read some of the later ones and I didn't like them very much, but this one is very compelling. He plays some fascinating games with language in it.''

Praised by the critic Kenneth Tynan for possessing ``a mind vitally infected with the rhythms of human speech'', celebrated by the film director Elia Kazan for having ``the nerve to stand naked before the world'', and lauded by the novelist and commentator Gore Vidal for introducing the idea of men as sexual beings to the theatre, Tennessee Williams died in February 1983, leaving a legacy of work that is experimental, accessible, and passionately-felt.

``What I like about his plays,'' says Richard Baron, ``is that they're written in such a theatrical way. He plays with the conventions of theatre all the time. What's exciting about them is that they're domestic situations that we can all relate to, but they have these huge themes - like in The Glass Menagerie you get an image of the mother kneeling doing the hem of the girl's dress as she stands with her arms outstretched, and you get this sudden picture of Jesus on the cross. There are all these thematic things - imagery about light, about sound, imagery linked in with characters - it's a really rich text.''

As an individual Tennessee Williams was restless, insecure, and neurotic - even at the height of his success he wrote that he found it ``easier to level with crowds of strangers in the hushed twilight of orchestra and balcony sections of the theatres than with individuals across a table'' - but as a dramatist and at his best, driving his dramas through the force of character not the imposition of plot, Williams invigorates actors and sets audiences on edge.

``Actors find him great because there's all that raw emotion which you don't get very much in British theatre,'' says Richard Baron. ``You can keep it reasonably flexible and let the actors go for that little bit of improvisation when they're in a big emotional scene and it becomes really exciting and raw.''

n The Glass Menagerie is at Dundee Rep from Friday until February 10; In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel is at the Citizens' Theatre, Glasgow, from February 29-March 23.