Rosamund Pike & Chris Carmack
in Summer and Smoke
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The West End revival of Tennessee Williams’ Summer and Smoke will end its run at the Apollo Theatre on 25 November. It officially opened on 18 October and was originally booking to 7 February 2007.
The 1948 play, unseen in London since it was staged at the Lyric Hammersmith in 1951 and subsequently transferred to the West End, stars Rosamund Pike as Alma, a repressed preacher’s daughter, in a story of longing and unrequited love. It was directed by Adrian Noble.
In his Theatre.com Review of the production, Matt Wolf wrote, “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…. This Summer 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.”
No production has been announced yet to move into the Apollo.