Not Alone II

A self-fulfilling prophecy, perhaps, but for the last ten years I have experienced a series of Tennessee Williams-related coincidences. No, I don’t believe it’s the playwright himself sending messages from the grave, or even echoes of his lobotomised sister’s brain remnants diffused somehow in my karma. I don’t much like the idea of karma in general - but that should be a standalone post. But there have been a series of small coincidences that, when considered in isolation, are only proof of the striking ability his words have to cut straight to my heart and overwhelm my spirit with poignancy, wistfulness and a (perhaps inappropriate) light of hope.


I walked out of the Young Vic Theatre in January, after seeing the Glass Menagerie, my heart squeezed, tears still trickling, yearning for simplicity and searching for hidden beauty in everything. I enjoy the cadence of Williams’ language and the way he crafts his characters. They are all detestable in their way, and yet beautiful. There is so much simmering under a surface that is drowsy like a summer’s day in the southern states of the US.

I think of myself as having fairly eclectic and odd taste in books and theatre, but there is one concept that sums up a lot of what I like: melodrama. That is, melodrama in the sense of taking small things and highlighting the emotion, the tension, because isn’t that what we all do? Isn’t that what blogging is excellent for? As a vehicle for melodrama? My taste in music is melodramatic: Muse is a case in point. If I had been born any later, I might have turned emo, but I have managed to escape that questionable fate.  Perhaps it is my penchant for melodrama that attaches me to Tennessee Williams. It is a strange affinity I have felt since quite a young age, when I saw the BBC telemovie of Suddenly Last Summer. I was only about 15.

But what, I hear you ask, was I referring to when I mentioned a series of coincidences. The first coincidence was most definitely grasping somewhat. I was walking along a footpath at my university with some friends, in the direction, I believe, of a journalism lecture. At one point, we were talking of Tennessee Williams - I don’t even remember what. And that was the beginning. Of course, it didn’t become a coincidence until I was walking with those same friends along the same path to the same lecture several weeks later, and we happened upon the same topic. I noticed it at the time with vague amusement and that became the Tennessee Williams path. After that, we did it on purpose. Every time we walked that way, someone had to mention Tennessee Williams. That was not really a very impressive coincidence. I would have to make excessive use of the tool of melodrama to make that worthy of even a blog post.

The second coincidence is slightly more impressive. On 16 January 2010, I saw Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (the all black production) at the Novello Theatre. It was excellent and James Earl Jones was fantastic. He started out weak and frail (the character is dying, after all) and you had to wonder whether his own 70+ years were taking their toll, but then the strength of Big Daddy emerged in the second act. Then, without realising it, the man and I booked tickets to see the Glass Menagerie on 15 January 2011 - it’s actually the same weekend, just a year later.

The third coincidence is one for you social media-ites. Being a newbie to Twitter, I don’t really know, beyond friends, theatres and bands who I should follow, so I looked through my friends’ followers and, in the spirit of online interactions, I started following someone I don’t know because her blog looked interesting (here’s one for you LiteratureBitch). Just before I joined Twitter, I had succumbed to an amazon impulse buy (comfortably under my £5 threshold) in the form of a collection of four Tennessee Williams plays and I started reading one. The very first Tweet that popped up in my feed from LiteratureBitch was: What are you reading? I’m reading A Streetcar Named Desire.