Period of Adjustment, Almeida Theatre, London
I’m afraid I married a stranger.” “Everybody does that.” Period of Adjustment is that rare thing, a Tennessee Williams comedy. Many of his plays end with a positive affirmation, but usually that is achieved in the face of death or disaster. Not so here. Although for much of the play it looks as if we are observing two marriages heading for the divorce courts, early on we sense the play has nowhere to go but a happy ending. That ought to be trite, but Williams makes much of his material awkwardly intimate, so we are kept in suspense.
There are many reasons to consider Williams the greatest American playwright, and one of them is simply that no other has written so well for actors. His characters are seen from all sides, they keep taking us by surprise and their weaknesses are related to their strengths. And he gives them great lines. Often it astonishes me that so many of his plays have been turned into successful films, because he gives his characters a quality of utterance that often seems to be the very stuff of theatre. In Period of Adjustment, four undistinguished Americans become astoundingly vivid.
Though the play occurs on Christmas Eve and would be perfect Christmas fare, Howard Davies’s production is a very welcome addition to the London theatre scene right now.
Jared Harris’s Ralph is the anchor: the play depends on his perfectly judged blend of pliant strength and uneasy tenderness. The last to arrive on stage, Sandy McDade, makes his unlovely wife Dorothea utterly distinctive. As Isabel, a virginal, inhibited and dismayed bride with the Texas accent from hell, Lisa Dillon is heart-catching, with the face of the young Elizabeth Taylor beneath a Marilyn Monroe wig. You hang on the vulnerability in her eyes and smiles. Even the Texas accent comes to embody all the repression that she must thaw. Benedict Cumberbatch, another of London’s fast-rising actors, finely catches her husband George’s yet fiercer façade and the shakes that keep returning to him (a legacy of warfare). He brings him a virile warmth that makes us hope for the marriage. London has not seen Period of Adjustment since 1962. These actors make it all the more worth catching now
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