If you’re going to play with flawed texts, you need to know how to play script doctor. Director Lucy Bailey, whose fringe venture The Print Room looks to be dealing in resuscitations rather than revivals, is more nurse than physician. As with the Acykbourn oddity Snake in the Grass, she’s patched this wonky Tennessee Williams up smartly, even if she hasn’t restored it to full health.
The issue with Kingdom of Earth is its trade in extremes and counterparts. Its characters are less people than humours. They are ideas that, when set in opposition, give the impression of drama by numbers. At its centre are two half-brothers battling over the family’s Mississippi farm. Lot (Joseph Drake) is a frail, fey city-type, an occasional transvestite with tuberculosis, a bleached blonde in a pale suit. David Sturzaker’s Chicken is the inverse: muscular, blunt, simple and mixed-race. He wears a uniform of mud stains and chaps. Were they to work together, they could make a neat Beckettian partnership, serving one another like Hamm and Clov or Lucky and Pozzo. Set against each other, however, they trade blows as inevitably and infinitely as a Newton’s cradle.
The oil between these jammed cogs is Myrtle, the wife Lot has married to prevent the property passing to Chicken after his encroaching death. An escapee of small-town showbiz, she’s breezy, coquettish and firm: bright pastels to the monochrome semi-siblings. There’s an obvious lineage from Blanche Dubois, but her steeliness also lends shades of Ruth in The Homecoming. In terms of narrative, Myrtle is the messenger that gets shot. She ping-pongs between the brothers, instructed by each to obtain a document from the other: Lot needs the deeds to the property, Chicken the marriage licence.
Around this irreconcilable triangle, Williams goes heavy on other diametric forces: darkness and light; savagery and civilisation; colonial and native; winter and spring. The various elements knock against each other like a never-ending game of rock, paper, scissors. Earth is being fought over. The house is threatened by an incoming flood. People are marked by their breathing: Lot wheezes towards death, Mrytle whistles asthmatically and Chicken rumbles with menace.
What can’t be cured must be endured and Bailey’s approach is to embrace the disparities within. It’s as if she’s put the play through fractional distillation, siphoning off its component parts into separate containers. Ruth Sutcliffe’s set explodes the farmhouse into a mound of earth, as if already destroyed by the flood to come (thus highlighting the basic futility beneath the feud). With the trio clambering and stumbling, it gains the look of a Pina Bausch compilation, only with three different dancers and three different tunes. Bailey stretches the play, finding in it isolation and philosophic vastness to counter its dramatic naivety. Mountains and molehills spring to mind.
However, Bailey’s explosion pushes the characters out of one another’s orbit. Had she pushed against the text, in which they already repel each other, she might have found (or concocted) similarities to tether them together and thus, add nuance to enormity. The interesting question is how Lot and Chicken are related, both in terms of family and objective. Just as ying contains yang, we need to spot traces of one in the other.
As such, it’s real interest comes when it moves beyond the brothers’ mudslinging to make Mrytle’s entrapment central. Fiona Glascott is superb, lacing the sexiness that sets Chicken salivating with a gawky vulnerability. Williams has bequeathed her the obstacle of inevitability; from the moment this Southern belle steps into the beast’s lair, it can only end in sexual abuse. Glascott overcomes this with distraction techniques, making the former showgirl’s every move a miniature turn. She’s so captivatingly out of sorts, so raggedy and unaware, that we almost forget that she’s stuck between the devil and the deep, until both come crashing down on her at once.
However, there’s more within worthy of exhumation and it’s only with these last gasps that this Kingdom of Earth really moves.
Photograph: Sheila Burnett
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