Leif Zern: In Tennessee Williams are only two yardsticks

What has Georges Feydeau and Tennessee Williams at the royal dramatic theatre to do? The start of the spring season on the Small stage and on the Generator. The French farskungen and the psychological ångbastuns master. They should be on a collision course. I'm not so sure.

Tennessee Williams (1911-83) is perhaps the biggest surprise. He, admittedly, has its given place in the modern theater's history. But without Hollywood, he had been forgotten. Marlon Brando in his white undershirt, Elizabeth Taylor, in various stages of nervous breakdown, Richard Burton on the lights, the Vivian Leighs aristocratic frailty, Paul Newman adorable lower lip, Katharine hepburn's hissing mammamonster...

physically handicapped. Laura Wingfield in ”the glass menagerie” is låghalt, while the former star shown throughout the video Brick in ”Cat on a hot tin roof” is both impotent and symbolic, equipped with crutches. The late drama of the ”Vieux Carré” from 1977 is hypokondrikerns nightmare, full of tuberculosis, leukemia, and cataracts.

Tennessee Williams is good at diagnoses. It places him somewhere in the tradition of Ibsen, Strindberg, and Eugene O'neill. The above-mentioned Brick plagued by the hypocrisy he experiences in society and in her own marriage, the skuldbelagda homosexuality that gave these pieces a kind of tickling added in the fifties halvvärld of lies and conspiracy theories.

They land in a town controlled by an unscrupulous tycoon with privatarmé and totalitarian ambitions. He wants to build a wall. Trump, we would say today.

the work experience that we are living in a similar time, which can explain to a playwright who has long been regarded as the light faded suddenly is back at the royal Dramatic theatre's repertoire, not with one but with two plays, it was ”Orpheus descending”, previously played as ”the Man in the ormskinnsjacka”, plus the more " undisputed masterpiece ”Line Lust” (premiere 29/3).

Of Tennesse Williams, society is a jungle. Here are just two standards: winning or losing. The titles tell a story of the struggle for survival. Venue is often the american south with the wilderness around the corner. Iguanan sneaking in the bushes when Richard burton's revenues and våldtäktsanklagade priest arriving to Mexico in the forefront of a group of church ladies on the lookout for that extra. On the site there is the Ava Gardner pensionatsvärdinna, happily surrounded by two local toy boys, swaying to the rhythm with their maracas.

How could life be but all too rarely.

often to not see beyond the individual. It is not always true. In ”Youth's sweet bird” is a avdankad actor, and a failed gigolo – Geraldine Page and Paul Newman in the movie from the 1960s – on a rather wet tour when they land in a town controlled by an unscrupulous tycoon with privatarmé and totalitarian ambitions. He wants to build a wall. Trump, we would say today.

I suspect that this is why we play him again – because we recognize ourselves in the brutal depiction of a society where the liberal dream of reason and the call has been sophögen.

If Georges Feydeau describes the human existence as a blindly machinery where no one is master in his own house, writes Tennessee Williams melodramas of a tropical undergrowth of the bestial and uncontrolled urges. War of all against all. There are two sides of the same thing. In one case, laugh, in the second case, are we closing our eyes. The theatre has notoriously always been a reliable konjunkturinstitut.