Review: A LOVELY SUNDAY FOR CREVE COEUR, Print Room at the Coronet, 15 September 2016

It's an unmistakable voice (an unmistakable accent too): the drawling, slightly tipsy or slightly anxious, voice of Tennessee Williams's Deep South. A Lovely Sunday For Creve Coeur may be late Williams, but it's definitely him, and hats off to director Michael Oakley for finding this neglected work and investing it with languid life in the dog days of London's Indian Summer.

It's the 1930s and we're in a gaudy St Louis tenement block with its garish wallpaper and walk-in kitchenette. It's shared by fading Southern Belle-cum-lush Dotty and busy, indeed busybody, Bodey. Dotty is making decent money as a schoolteacher and has aspirations to move on to better things, not least in her pursuit of dashing school principal Ellis, with whom she is infatuated - feelings, alas, not reciprocated. When outrageous snob and fellow teacher Helena turns up to bully Dotty into signing a lease to move out and share her upscale apartment on the other side of town (and to bully the grieving Fräulein Gluck mercilessly), Dotty has some difficult choices to make.

That set-up has something of the soap opera about it, with domesticity coming under pressure and romantic love a source of pain rather than pleasure (though sex, by this production's 1979 premiere, could be acknowledged as joyous as well as problematic), but what lifts this play from predictability is the quality of the writing and acting. Williams gives us four wholly believable, vulnerable women, grappling to get a grip on their destinies, but fragile too, since this world is not full of friends with good intentions. The conversations are beautifully rendered and there are three or four set-pieces, almost soliloquies, which are heartbreakingly powerful in their laying bare of souls.

The four actors circle each other with great skill, giving full value to the script. Laura Rogers invests Dotty with a coy sexiness, stretching to maintain her runaway model figure, but stretching too for the sherry that blanks out her disappointments in love. Though not in any sense miscast, I felt it a little hard to believe that a woman with so much going for her, not least a healthy attitude to sex and sufficient knowledge to catch a spectacular passage of double entendres, would be condemned to a choice between the caddish principal and her flatmate's unattractive brother - few men would have turned Dotty down, I promise you!

Hermione Gulliford is appallingly rude as not-quite-so-rich-bitch Helena, who opens a window on to her life in a sad lament about women who eat alone. Julia Watson babbles in accurate German as Gluck - a punchbag for Helena, a warning for Dotty and a surrogate child for Bodey.

Ah, Bodey. Debbie Chazen brilliantly captures this feisty, efficient whirlwind of a woman with her hearing aid, her brother whom she is determined to foist upon Dotty, and the gaping, empty space in her heart which children might have filled. Sure, she's a "type" (all four women topple into caricature intermittently), but she's decent and she's honourable, if a little prudish. Chazen is captivating in the role.

If the first half drags a little, Fotini Dimou's splendidly detailed set gives us plenty to look at and the dilapidated chic of the venue gives us plenty to think about too. It may not be in the first rank of Williams's canon, but it's a fine play delivered with some panache by a cast and director who know exactly which buttons to press.

As an aside, the programme for this production is as good as any I have seen on the Fringe and, for once, is well worth the price.

A Lovely Sunday For Creve Coeur continues at The Print Room at The Coronet until 7 October.

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