Tennessee Williams was aged 70, two years from his death, when he wrote Something Cloudy, Something Clear in 1981. The story of an older writer looking back 40 years to his younger self - to one summer spent camping in the sand dunes on Cape Cod, where he fell in love with a beautiful draft-dodging Canadian dancer called Kip - it carries the attributes of the memory play but with added poignancy.
The play was initially unfavourably received, but this British premiere by the young company Bright Angel shows how misjudged those reactions were, confirming it as a work of sensitivity with, in its evocation of doomed youth, strong echoes of Scott Fitzgerald.
There is a self-lacerating quality to Williams's autobiographical reassessment of the past (homosexuality shown up close and critical) that verges on embarrassment as he portrays the (ill) treatment of Kip and Clare, the young woman who befriended Kip like a sister.
However, the playwright's daring use of time frames, poetic sensibility and contrasting satiric eye lifts the piece on to an entirely different plane. Something Cloudy, Something Clear's achievement is not just in the deftness of its double-edged meanings, but also in its devastating portrait of human relations as transactions with soiled bargaining counters.
Whether for love or economic survival, they all amount to the same thing - a pessimism belied by the beauty of Tamara Harvey's production, which captures Williams's inner world as surely as she does his Atlantic exterior one.
In a fine cast, James Hillier as August, the writer's swilling alter ego, Bruce Godfree as Kip and Kate Sissons's Clare are all equally heart-breaking. Nikki Leigh Scott and Susan Bovell are both sensational as respective
Broadway cadavers, the one youthful, the other an ageing Tallulah Bankhead.
Until 14 June. Information: 020 7373 3842.
Something Cloudy, Something Clear
