The long night of the soul is a wellworn theme. Yet Tennessee Williams’ The Night of the Iguana has a far from familiar feel. In the claustrophobic heat of Mexico, the play portrays a night of despair as Shannon (Sam Aldred) battles his ghosts. Shannon is a defrocked priest, clinging desperately to his job as a tour guide.
The play opens as he arrives at a hotel, tour group in tow. As the play progresses, Shannon hovers on the edge of emotional collapse, while the tourists grow ever more mutinous. Shannon must battle the emotional blackmail of Charlotte, a sixteen-year-old musical prodigy who he has rather unwisely slept with, and the attacks of her ‘butch vocal coach’, Miss Fellowes. In the midst of this an unlikely bond springs up between Shannon and Hannah (Thea Warren), a spinster staying in the hotel. The play sparkles with wit and insight, and the odd bleakly comic line eases the emotional tension.
Sam Aldred steals the show as Shannon. He dominates the stage, and captures the distracted air of a man haunted by the figures of his own mind. His performance is vehement enough to be unsettling, yet skilfully avoids tipping over into melodrama. Arabella Lawson seems to make a sufficiently frantic, if slightly screechy, Charlotte. Yet the initial scene between Shannon and Hannah could have been more credible and intimate. Without a strong bond between Shannon and old spinster Hannah, there is nothing to relieve the play’s introspection. The exploration of Shannon’s demons is perceptive, and Aldred brings it to life. Despite its over-intensity, the play left me itching to read the rest of it, and brought back half-remembered lines of Tennessee Williams that A-level had not quite managed to ruin. Well worth seeing, but not for the emotionally unstable.
By Elizabeth Bennett
The Night of the Iguana
