Decadence: The Night of the Iguana at the Noël Coward Theatre
The Night of the Iguana
Fiery Angel
Noël Coward Theatre
Balcony AA10, £19.75
15 July 2019
Show page
I fear my more-or-less mutual interests in Tennessee Williams and seeing film actors on stage make me an easy target for productions such as this of The Night of the Iguana. Not that I didn’t enjoy it, but I felt a little guilty, a little besmirched in my pleasure. Appropriately, oh ho.
Like Summer and Smoke I’m not convinced that The Night of the Iguana is one of Tennessee Williams’s plays that needs to be staged. I suppose I should say, at least not on the basis of this production, but it is in no way obviously bad. It even has quite a cool rainstorm, complete with dogged stagehands trembling the palm leaves; and that sort of fussily designed, intricately packed prop-strewn set that seems to be in vogue on the West End of the minute.
Director James Macdonald recognises the most forceful ingredient in his melange and gives Lia Williams all the space she needs to create a kind of forcefield of intensity about herself. She turns it on like a switch and when she does it is almost as if time stops, or slows to treacle; all goes quiet, the birds stop singing, everything other than her becomes faintly indistinct. The interference generated when she comes into contact with Clive Owen, who has not so much a forcefield as an unconscious bullish energy snared in its own muscle, is strange and mesmeric.
This alien, perturbing intent of Lia Williams and the impotent, inchoate anger of Owens are each rooted in the characters of the play, and credit must go to Tennessee Williams for giving the actors the material from which to feed. But, unlike with his best plays, it’s not quite enough to shoo off the insistent nag that, really, this is all rather silly. It feels almost cruel to think that; pass down the Tennessee Williams checklist and there’s not much The Night of the Iguana doesn’t have – oppressive heat, untrustworthy natives, self-flagellating sensuality, semi-wilful madness, daughters enslaved to their fathers. It seems cruel because there are far sillier Tennessee Williams plays that I have found more serious.
Maybe it would have helped with a stronger third player than Anna Gunn, who didn’t manage to make her character anything more than a down-the-line venus flytrap; though perhaps the text doesn’t drop many hints of the different directions she could have taken it. As it is, The Night of the Iguana stays as an interesting curio: meat for Lia Williams, exercise for Owen, a pleasurable way to spend an evening, nucleating wonderings on control and duty and pleasure and autonomy – but maybe, for the sake of efficiency, equally well enjoyed read at home in a book.
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