Rosamund Pike in Summer and Smoke

Matt Wolf in his Theatre.com Review: “There's a lovely pastel hue to Peter McKintosh's for Summer and Smoke, so why then is this rare British sighting of Tennessee Williams's 1948 play so colourless? Adrian Noble's production does well enough when it adheres to the unexpectedly Chekhovian template of a text whose heroine's longstanding unrequited love for the boy-turned-hunky-man next door may put you in mind of Masha in Three Sisters—or any of a half-dozen other Chekhov gals who pined and swooned and didn't get the guy. But the problem announces itself when, near the very end, Rosamund Pike's Alma Winemiller tells her beloved John Buchanan (Chris Carmack) that her first name is ‘Spanish for soul.’ That, alas, is the very quality Noble's emotionally and sexually becalmed staging struggles to achieve, the hothouse passions of America's most affectively keen and clear-eyed dramatist here given a distinctly British wash…. ThisSummer and Smoke gives us the contours of the play—and Williams completists will quite rightly grab the chance to add it to their repertoire—without the roiling emotional content; I left the theatre notably dry-eyed. Much of the problem lies with a performance from Pike that is careful and measured and quite possibly too fully intellectualised to be deeply felt.”

Benedict Nightingale of The London Times: ”Pike resists the temptation to emphasise the character's Southern preciosity, giving us a woman who is as serious and mentally able as she is beautiful. She flashes big, white smiles, but they are mostly social, a glimmer that conceals the feelings simmering within. She is especially effective at the moments when Dr. John unbuttons her blouse before applying his stethoscope to her chest, or kisses her at that very questionable casino. Somehow she suggests that she is simultaneously resisting and accepting, moving forward and moving backward, melting and icing up. It is genuinely erotic stuff, but, without any forcing on Williams' part, it also leads to a fascinating moral debate. What makes a person? At another emotional climax, John shows Alma an anatomy chart: head for reasoning, belly for ingesting food, genitals for what he calls love and she a mere animal drive. Her name is actually the Spanish word for "soul", and soul, she says, is what is missing from the picture. And he listens to her while she listens to him. The result is an ending that reverses both our expectations and the two main characters.”

Michael Billington of The Guardian: “Although not seen in London for over 50 years, Tennessee Williams' play has an oddly familiar feel to it. Watching the encounter of a romantically ardent woman and a self-destructive man, the penny dropped: this was a variation on O'Neill's A Moon for the Misbegotten. But, although Williams' play is full of plangent poetic beauty, it cannot match its rival for sheer emotional intensity. Apart from O'Neill, the play also reminds one of Williams' own Streetcar Named Desire… One's doubts are overcome by the Chekhovian atmosphere of Adrian Noble's production and the performances. Rosamund Pike endows Alma with a porcelain beauty and a simmering sensuality. Chris Carmack makes you believe in Buchanan's conversion from dissipated wreck to medical idealist. And there is vivid support from Angela Down as Alma's demented mother, and Kate O'Toole as a predator who puts the vulture into culture. If not vintage Tennessee, it is a play which fully justifies revival.”

Rosamund Pike & Chris Carmack in Summer and Smoke

Charles Spencer of The Daily Telegraph: “Summer and Smoke certainly doesn't belong in the top drawer of Tennessee Williams' plays and indeed, until this revival was announced, I was completely unaware of its existence. Written at about the same time as A Streetcar Named Desire it concerns another damaged southern belle but, unlike Williams' most celebrated masterpiece, this work, set in 1916, frequently feels schematic and laboured, with the dramatist straining in vain for stage poetry. Worse still, the sudden eruption of melodrama into the scenario comes dangerously close to the risible as a preposterous Mexican casino owner murders a respectable family doctor simply to give the flagging plot a kick in the pants. Yet even flawed Tennessee Williams can be a great deal more rewarding than the supreme achievements of lesser dramatists, and so it proves again here. Rosamund Pike, until now best known as the best Bond girl in recent memory, and for the most thrilling shower scene since Psycho in Terry Johnson's Hitchcock Blonde, proves herself a stage actress of real stature… [She] beautifully communicates Alma's poignant hope, her terrible loneliness and the deep underlying desire she tries so desperately to repress. The result is powerfully moving. Like all the best actresses, in short, she can turn dodgy writing into something credible, and in those moments when Williams finds his best form, the strength and candour of her emotion is devastating.”

Nicholas de Jongh of The Evening Standard: “A modern American classic is rediscovered. Of all Tennessee Williams's plays none has been more mysteriously neglected here than this beautiful, poetic lament for a sexually desolate preacher's daughter, Alma Winemiller… Summer and Smoke dates from Williams' great period of The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire, whose frightened and passionate heroines have striking points of emotional and sexual similarity with Alma. Yet it has languished in oblivion for 55 years since the London premiere. Adrian Noble's production misses Williams' bleak comedy and becomes too winsomely picturesque, but reveals the play's enduring vitality… Rosamund Pike, that cool, pale English rose girl of chocolate-box good looks, to whom natural elegance and sophistication insist upon clinging, never betrays the jangles and jitters of the chronically nervous or sexually virginal. Her talents lie elsewhere—at least 20 miles away. Unable to summon up symptoms of spinsterishness, to suggest what sexual longings pulse beneath Alma's facade or to sob uncontrollably, Miss Pike's Alma wafts serenely through her small-town life, with literary evenings at home, while trying to care for a doleful preacher father and malicious, mentally impaired mother.”

Quentin Letts of The Daily Mail: “For some time now it has been clear that Rosamund Pike is one of the beauties of our age. Such porcelain-perfect poise of neck. The hint of Asia in those light-lashed eyes. A wasp’s waist, husky voice, and nicely-gnarled fingers to prove she’s not too, too perfect. But could she command a stage? A brief venture some months ago in the East End suggested not. Maybe she was just a film star, a mannequin for the camera’s ‘slow-mo’ linger. Last night she proved this doubter completely wrong. Her performance as a parson’s daughter in early 2-th-century Mississippi is one of the best things of the West End year. Miss Pike is magnificent, imperious, brilliant, superb—throw at her every superlative in the critic’s over-mined cupboard, for all I care. In this show, she’s the tops.”