Tennessee, in this photo, looks like a regular, totally together, dead average, happy-with-himself kind of guy. Read about him, though, and you get told about drugs, drink, mental inequilibrium, mad sister…
Also, as I began to know his work, I noted that few practitioners could agree on how to present his plays on stage. For many years the story was that he only ever wrote one comedy – and that was a dismissible failure. Also, for a long time, his work was thought to be ‘difficult’ – full of special staging problems… best left to occasional ‘worthy’ or ‘educational’ presentations for that tiny minority of the British public that could stand the exchange of views and ideas on stage, as against rattling good yarns, adultery- shockers or whoddunits. Tennessee was an American, which didn’t help, and English actors and companies had often come a cropper trying to get to grips with Yankee writers.
Then, I was in a play by Williams. A revelation. I put on the same play at the King’s Head theatre. Tennessee came to see it. He was not at all like his photograph, but he laughed all the way through the show. The full story is, of course, in Are You Going to do That Little Jump? – The Adventure Continues.
