It’s a matter of life and death, like so much of Tennessee Williams. There’s
a widow, Serafina, deep in mourning for her husband. There’s her daughter
Rosa, whose spirit she tries to bridle. Then there’s the amorous truck
driver who bursts into their lives in the Sicilian community of New Orleans.
And that’s just the play, The Rose Tattoo, which was completed
in 1950 and is toxic with the playwright’s pain for the suffering of his
mentally ill sister, Rose.
Then there’s the imminent production of the work at the National Theatre.
This too has been stalked by grief since the death of its director, Steven
Pimlott, on February 14, just days into the rehearsals. That in turn
quickens the sadness of Zoë Wanamaker, who plays Serafina, and whose titanic
father Sam died 13 years ago, also of cancer.
Early in our conversation about these things there is a voice from beyond the
grave, as Wanamaker reads from Pimlott’s notes: “Williams’s view is that the
theatre is part of eternity. We are all going to die, but there is a sense
(in the theatre) that separates us from the rush of time.”
Suddenly she and I are talking about cancer again, and it takes on the role
of a diligent nemesis poised in the wings of large and vigorous lives,
waiting for its plot-changing entry. I say “again” because when I last met
her, while she was rehearsing for another Williams play, The Glass
Menagerie , her father had recently died. His struggle had been so
valiant but so agonised that it turned Zoë, the middle of his three
daughters, into an active supporter of the Euthanasia Society. She had also
just married the actor Gawn Grainger, whose own first wife had been claimed
by the illness.
“That’s the terrible thing about this disease,” she says. “People get
remissions which look like recoveries but turn out to be frauds. Some
survive and some don’t. Everyone knew that Steven had been very ill. When we
started rehearsing he was in remission. This was actually one reason for
doing it, because it is so much about life and death. There was a wonderful
glory about him in his remission, and I thought how wonderful it was that
this man should have recovered — to the extent that he had. I was very sad
not to have known him before we started work. Reading the obituaries and
seeing the photos of him when he was well, that was very poignant. Everyone
who had known him spoke so highly of him, and they obviously adored him. I
did feel somewhat guilty, as if we had killed him.
“All the conversations we had with him about resurrection, and then suddenly
he wasn’t there. Another of the observations he made about Tennessee’s world
was that it contains strong links between the spiritual and the sexual. He
also made the point that he [Williams] is never pejorative or judgmental
about his characters. This had never occurred to me. They may be damaged, or
out of control in some way, but he always handles them with tremendous
humanity.”
Wanamaker has the distinction of having acted at the National under all its
regimes. There was The Importance of Being Earnest for Peter Hall, The
Crucible for Richard Eyre, His Girl Friday for Trevor Nunn, and
now this one for Nicholas Hytner, who has taken over the directing of it
himself.
Of course Pimlott’s death coloured rehearsals for a bit, she says, “but then
you have to get on with it and bring the play to life as best you can. Like
Steven’s own life, we have to celebrate it. And it will be a celebration.
It’s a massive piece of work with a strange, surreal quality about it — all
these people coming in: a teacher, a salesman, a preacher, a doctor. This
whole Sicilian life going on.”
Described by Williams as his “love-play to the world”, it was last seen in
the West End in 1991 in a production by Peter Hall, with Julie Walters as
Serafina and Ken Stott as her suitor Alvaro.
Wanamaker says she has to “find a foreignness” for this heroine, more so than
for other Tennessee Williams parts. She was, after all, born in America, and
came to England with her actor parents when she was 3. So she was an
immigrant, as her ancestors had been in the opposite direction. It is of
course ironic that the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants should have had to
make this return journey in order to flee the later brand of persecution by
Senator McCarthy. Sam Wanamaker had never actually belonged to the Communist
Party, but he had come to London to film Give Us This Day. This was a
piece of Depression-era realism that pointed an accusing finger at
capitalism, and as such was thought too radical to be made in the States. It
was while he was here that he learned he had been subpoenaed by the House
UnAmerican Activities Committee, and decided to stay.
Just as John Mortimer continues to voyage round his father, so does Zoë
around hers. It is understandable, given the size of his personality and the
undying determination he showed to bring the Globe Theatre into being. It
took him well over 20 years and might well have thwarted someone with a
native appreciation of British bureaucracy. The Globe is, she concedes, a
monument to him, whether he would have wanted that or not.
For all his obduracy there were a few things that came to pass against his
will, and one of them was Zoë going into the acting profession. “He was an
actor,” she says, “he had known what rejection was like. I don’t know how
successful he felt. The blacklisting certainly curtailed his movie career,
and in a financial way he was never particularly successful. But he started
Liverpool [becoming director of the city’s Shakespeare Theatre in 1957], and
he was very proud of that.” With a symbolism that Tennessee Williams might
have relished, he played the role of Alvaro, the agent of Serafina’s return
to life, in a 1958 production there of The Rose Tattoo, which he
also directed.
He was proud of his daughter, too, and would have continued to be. In the 13
years since his death she has had a succession of acclaimed stage
appearances, none more so than in the Frank McGuinness adapation of
Sophocles’ Electra at the Donmar Warehouse. But she has also
achieved national and international recognition through the TV sitcom My
Family, playing opposite Robert Lindsay, and in Harry Potter and the
Philosopher’s Stone, as Rolanda Hooch.
“I was lucky,” she says, but she is not talking about her career. She is
thinking of the relationship she came to have with her father, who could
evidently be a monster American patriarch when the mood took him. “I had no
agenda with him,” she says, “whereas I think my sisters did. I had stopped
being angry or upset by him. He knew exactly what I felt about him. We had
an understanding. I accepted him for what he was, and vice versa.
“He could be awful, stubborn as hell, cut people off, lose his temper — oh,
but full of other stuff. He was a powerhouse. And if people always link his
name to the Globe, that’s all right because it’s important to keep these
people alive, and not morbid.”
There is, all the while, an elephant in the room — a small elephant that
takes the form of a packet of dark roll-up papers and a supply of tobacco.
After an hour Wanamaker is getting twitchy, but it seems to be on account of
the guilt over what she is about to do, rather than a nicotine craving. She
opens the door of the little room at the top of the National that gives out
on to a terrace overlooking the river. She does this as smokers do in the
debatable areas of public transport — furtive but defiant. She lights up in
the doorway and stands there, still talking into the room but puffing the
smoke out of it.
“I know what your question is,” she says. “It’s why don’t I stop, isn’t it?”
No, actually. It was going to be about whether she felt guilt, or anything
along those lines, about smoking. Not so much social guilt as a more
personal kind. People often do when close ones have died as they did. She
doesn’t. But since she asks, yes, why doesn’t she stop?
She thinks about it for a second and then says “I don’t know.” She seems
genuinely puzzled, but also undeterred.
The Rose Tattoo starts previews at the National Theatre (020-7452
3000) tonight as part of the Travelex £10 Season and opens on March 29
