For Dominic Cooke, director of the Gate's Irish première of a little-known Tennessee Williams play, the poetry is the challenge, he tells Helen Meany
Summer and Smoke was Tennessee Williams's original title for this play and it's a shame it didn't survive. In every other respect, Eccentricities of a Nightingale is an improvement on the earlier version, which Williams wrote in the 1960s, following the success of A Streetcar Named Desire. Extensively rewritten, condensed and renamed, it was first performed in its new form in New York in the mid-1970s. It remains little known and rarely seen; this month's staging at the Gate Theatre will be its first Irish production, with a cast that includes Lia Williams, Risteárd Cooper, Susan Fitzgerald, John Kavanagh and Barbara Brennan, directed by Dominic Cooke, an associate director of the Royal Shakespeare Company.
The nightingale in question is Alma, the sensitive daughter of a Southern clergyman and his unstable wife. As Alma puts her heart and soul into singing at church functions, she yearns for the attentions of a neighbour's son, a young doctor who has mother troubles of his own. The name of the setting, Glorious Hill, a small town in Mississippi on the eve of the first World War, immediately summons up the familiar, dreamy lushness of the playwright's dramatic world, as do the titles of the play's three acts: 'The Feeling of a Singer', 'The Tenderness of a Mother' and 'A Cavalier's Plume'.
As Dominic Cooke observes, it's the work of a writer who was half a playwright and half a poet.
"The poetry is the challenging part for a director," he says. "Usually in Tennessee Williams there's one character who actually is a poet, and in this case it's Alma. She is the poetic soul in a small town, with her own sense of reality and also a strong determination and wilfulness. And she's the character with whom Williams himself identifies. Like all of his work, this is a highly autobiographical piece."
For Cooke, Eccentricities is significantly superior to the earlier version, Summer and Smoke.
"It's a hugely different play," he says. "The earlier version was more sprawling. This is much more condensed and implicit; less is said."
The character who changes most between the two versions is the eligible young doctor, John Buchanan, who has some of the wittiest lines in the play, as he responds to Alma's fervid outbursts with irony and deadpan humour. Elements of social comedy ripple through Williams's characteristic fusion of languor, intensity and sublimated desire.
Cooke was not familiar with the play before Michael Colgan approached him last year.
"To me it's a real discovery, it's beautiful and powerful," he says. "My ideas of what it's about have changed since we began rehearsing it, as often happens. I thought it was about being in a small, close-knit community and desperately yearning for something else. Now I think that it's exploring how society destroys the artist.
"In that sense I think there's a very close relationship to Streetcar. Alma and Blanche [in Streetcar] have similar creative qualities and a similar role in their community. There's a tension in both of them between the physical and the spiritual. For Williams, these two couldn't be reconciled. There was a conflict in him between high-mindedness and promiscuity. But I haven't really underlined things in the production.
"What's already there in the writing is an idea about how communities develop a response to 'the Other' and how unthinking that can be."
Coming to the play without knowing its performance history or having seen a previous production was liberating for Cooke. Without any preconceived ideas he is responding to the text and taking care to retain the poetic dimension of the play.
"So many productions of Tennessee Williams are very earthbound," he says. "Especially in the US, where you often get a kind of literalism. But with a setting in a place called Glorious Hill there has to be a metaphorical significance too. I'm trying to root the play in both worlds, the poetic and the naturalistic.
"In many ways Williams was ahead of his time, with his emphasis on minimalism, which we take for granted now. And he writes very formally and rhetorically, using antithesis in the dialogue."
Cooke is more used to developing new plays by living playwrights, at the Royal Court Theatre in London, where he has been a full-time associate director for the past few years. Having the author in the room during rehearsals is an enriching and enlightening experience for him, which keeps the text as the central focus.
"In Britain - and in Ireland and the US, I think - we view the director as an interpretive artist who is serving the author," he says. "In Europe that is viewed as a reactionary approach, and the text is viewed merely as a springboard for a directorial concept."
He does see the danger of the text-led approach being too "drearily puritanical" and cerebral, however, and admires the visceral imagination of many European productions - largely a result of longer rehearsal times and of having dedicated, well-paid ensembles of actors who are theatre specialists.
In addition to nurturing new British writing talent, he has adapted and directed an award-winning version of The Arabian Nights for adults and older children. A Young Vic production which toured extensively, it came to the Dublin Theatre Festival in 1999, and has since been adapted by him for BBC Radio Four. With actors both narrating and performing in an inventive ensemble production, it was story theatre at its best. A multi-racial cast of nine actors played all the parts, as well as animals and props, rivers and forests.
"I loved doing that," Cooke says. "The process of adapting the work, which took me ages, taught me a great deal, which has definitely fed into my directing of other things."
He will return to contemporary work, he says, but for the coming year he's exploring the classics: a production of Cymbeline for the Royal Shakespeare Company and La Bohème for Grange Park Opera.
"I want to do more great plays, with a poetic scale," he says. "They're a different kind of challenge. The chance to engage with a rare talent like Tennessee Williams comes along very rarely."
Eccentricities of a Nightingale opens at the Gate Theatre, Dublin, tomorrow
