We are gradually discovering the young Tennessee Williams. In Not About Nightingales, recently revived at the National, we saw him experimenting with prison melodrama. In this early 1940s play, receiving its British premiere in Lucy Bailey's inventive production, he opts for expressionist comedy. These early plays show Williams searching for his own voice, but you also find in them evidence of his distinctive signature: unstoppable sympathy with life's permanent victims.
Written during America's entry into the second world war, the play posits a world "crumbling to disaster", but Williams is less concerned with global warfare than domestic oppression. His hero, Ben Murphy, is an $18.50-a-week wage-slave with Consolidated Shirt-makers, who rebels against the regimentation of office life. Forsaking both professional tyranny and his pregnant wife, he goes on an urban night prowl, where he encounters a secretary smitten by love for her boss. Together they go on a wild, capricious adventure that involves liberating foxes in the zoo and participating in a weird carnival, before they ascend the symbolic stairs leading to the office roof.
The influences are palpable. Williams had clearly absorbed Elmer Rice's satire on automation The Adding Machine, a work that haunts American theatre (there's even a reference to it in The Producers). He was also heavily under the influence of William Saroyan's whimsy and DH Lawrence's sexual symbolism. But, although derivative and sometimes dotty, the play shows his hatred of subjugation and passion for risk. "Curiosity, courage, the lust for adventure" are qualities that Ben seeks to bring out in his travelling companion. It's a clear anticipation of Camino Real, where Byron's philosophy is: "Make voyages! Attempt them! There is nothing else!"
Stairs to the Roof may dwindle into absurdity, but it has the courage of its theatrical convictions. And it's imaginatively staged by Bailey (who previously brought us Baby Doll), with good design from Angela Davies. All the action takes place in front of a trans- parent wall of glass, behind which we see a whole range of shadow existences: what Williams calls "the gradual grinding down of the lives of the little people". The acting also transcends sentimentality, in that Aidan McArdle (the RSC's recent Richard III) lends the freedom-seeking Ben an angry asperity, and Catherine Walker brings out the resilient sexual ardour of the love-fraught secretary.
Williams's vision of society as a cage may not be particularly original or profound. What stirs one is his sympathy with the entrapped human animal, which was to become his lifelong theme.
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