Review - The Night of the Iguana: fear, self-loathing and the kindness of strangers
“We live on two levels,” says a washed-up and broken-down minister, “the realistic level and the fantastic level, and which is the real one, really?” Trying to navigate the two has left the clergyman “spooked”, and to shake off that spook and get a secure foothold on firm ground he has returned to a friend’s ramshackle hotel in the Gulf of Mexico. But she too has been rocked by a change of fortune, and several other paying guests have brought along their fair share of emotional baggage. Over the course of one long night in 1940, these lonely souls will trade woes, seek solace or salvation, and perhaps find the strength to soldier on after checking out.
Tennessee Williams’ 1961 play The Night of the Iguana is a real ensemble piece, one that only works wonders if all its damaged characters ring true. Fortunately, there are no weak links in James Macdonald’s triumphant new production. Tension is skilfully ratcheted up in the fragile calm before the storm, and once the heavens open we are moved and shaken by individual outpourings of feeling – rage, grief, frustration, and even creativity.
The Reverend Shannon, expertly portrayed by Clive Owen, describes the setting as a “dilapidated veranda of a cheap hotel, out of season, in a country caught and destroyed in its flesh and corrupted in its spirit by its gold-hungry Conquistadors.” He knows all about destruction of the flesh and corruption of the spirit: he has been locked out of his church for fornication and heresy (“in the same week”) and now, defrocked and disgraced, makes ends meet by conducting tour groups in Mexico. According to Williams he is “a young man who has cracked up before and is going to crack up again.” Owen impresses on us how the mighty has fallen: whether staggering around the stage or slumped in a hammock, he is a panting, sweating shambolic wreck in a crumpled white linen suit, a twitching bundle of nerves and pent-up anger.
Maxine Faulk, the recently-widowed proprietor of the Costa Verde, is on hand again to nurse Shannon through his latest breakdown. Anna Gunn (best known for her performance in Breaking Bad ) exudes equal measures of brassy confidence and glowing sensuality as the patrona , but also reveals at key moments, and with great subtlety, flashes of sorrow for the husband she has just lost and disappointment at unrealised ambitions. The other main female character is New England spinster and itinerant artist Hannah Jelkes, who travels the world with her grandfather (“ninety-seven years young !”), a poet agonising over the composition of his final poem. Lia Williams’ nuanced depiction of a loyal and loving granddaughter and a timid, brittle and financially insecure human being earns both our sympathy and our respect. But Williams also emphasises Hannah’s resilience. She peddles sketches and watercolours for a pittance but gets by, makes do and remains philosophical about the hardships that come her way.
Julian Glover imbues his aged poet with gravitas. Finty Williams elicits huge laughs as Miss Fellowes, a fuming, no-nonsense member of the tour group that Shannon has taken for a ride. Rae Smith’s set, featuring a hotel perched on a vertiginous cliff in the middle of rainforest is a commanding vision. It is so realistic that when the rain suddenly crashes down and lightning lets rip our immediate instinct is to run for cover.
Williams’ tale of hard-won redemption is not one of his top-drawer masterpieces. It lacks the violent passion of A Streetcar Named Desire and the quiet tragedy of The Glass Menagerie (“Seeing it,” said Arthur Miller of the latter, “was like stumbling on a flower in a junkyard”). Although Cat on a Hot Tin Roof also revolved around a group of tarnished individuals and their simmering emotions and shock revelations over the course of a hot summer night, its characters’ tighter connections helped create greater friction and consequently more potent drama. The Night of the Iguana is less cohesive and struggles in places to have an impact. Some elements see Williams skimping on detail: Maxine’s other guests, the Fahrenkopf family, do little apart from sporadically pop up to sing Nazi marching songs and cheer at radio reports of London bombings. At other times Williams presses too hard, not least with his symbolism. The eponymous iguana is tied-up and desperate to free itself – not unlike Hannah’s creatively hamstrung grandfather, or Shannon, “a man at the end of his rope who still has to try to go on.”
Perhaps the biggest stumbling block of all for modern audiences is Shannon himself. If it wasn’t bad enough that he has left his group of Texan Baptist ladies on the tour bus and taken the key, he has also had his wicked way with one of the youngest of them, sixteen-year-old Charlotte, who still dotes on him despite his post-coital brutality: “Larry, you struck me in the face, and you twisted my arm to make me kneel on the floor and pray with you for forgiveness.” Shannon has form here as Charlotte isn’t his first underage conquest, and it prompts Maxine to ask him, a little hopefully: “why don’t you lay off the young ones and cultivate an interest in normal grown-up women?”
And yet the play still packs a punch when in the right hands. This cast, from the main players to bit-parters like Maxine’s two “Mexican concubines” Pedro and Pancho, show just how much is at stake – in particular, Shannon’s sanity. Owen captivates when standing in the rain, howling at the moon and railing against a God he has forsaken. We listen, rapt, as Lia Williams recounts two disastrous sexual experiences. And Gunn makes us root for Maxine when she admits her loneliness to Shannon and appeals to him to stick around and forge a future together.
Such moments, both angry and tender, allow us to overlook the play’s faults and its author’s tapering talent. Williams’ biographer Donald Spoto argued that this work contains “a poetic depth of compassion.” It is there for all to see and feel in this bravura revival.
The Night of the Iguana is at Noël Coward Theatre, London, until September 28. For more information see here.
