MR. TENNESSEE WILLIAMS has a nose for incompleteness. His pla)s
specialise in people sheltered and unfinished, maladroit in the presence of hard reality wing-beating idealists, like the mother in The Glass Menagerie, Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire and Alma in Summer and Smoke fascinate him unfailingly into a kind of ribald compassion. These characters, whose forms of speech and mannerisms properly belong to Jane Austen, have become, in our century and above all in Mr. Williams' hemisphere, pathetic and invalid relicts. Equally within his compass is the opposite kind of incompleteness—the salty sensuality of Stanley Kowalski in Streetcar and John Buchanan in Summer and Smoke. But I detect a further and fundamental incompleteness in Mr. Williams himself. I do not think he envisages the possibility of a complete human being, in whom the testy exactions of spirit and flesh might fruitfully be recon- ciled. And it is by the absence of such a yardstick that we recognise a minor talent. Mr. Williams at present is a touching chronicler of inadequacy, an unsophisticated Tchehov, but the larger things elude him.
Summer and Smoke is the story of Alma, a young Southern spinster, and her infatuation with a rake. Cynically he accepts a rendezvous with her, and behaves with such scathing bluntness that she panics ; whereat he shrugs and jauntily returns to the midnight routs of his Mississippi Mohocks. At one of these brawls his father is killed, and overnight, a little unconvincingly, he reforms. But Alma, in the meantime, has swung over to his own earlier belief in the paramount claims of the senses ; and at the end it is, as she puts it, as if they had exchanged calls, and each had found the other away from home.
The play's weakness is a characteristic one: Mr. Williams never conveys the remotest likelihood that the couple could have reached any sort of mutual fulfilment. In one crucial speech the boy reveal- ingly asserts that human beings are made up of three separate and distinct hungers—those of the soul, the stomach and the flesh. The implication is one of choice, not coalition. If Mr. Williams' charac- ters, even at their best, have a depleted look, it is probably because they start out with the disadvantage of being internally lame beyond all surgery.
• To be fair, I must make it clear that Summer and Smoke contains a great deal of brilliant and evocative hothouse writing, in which symbols flower unforced, and which Mr. Peter Glenville's direction has matched with exactly the right bouquet of nostalgia. Miss Margaret Johnston, as Alma, riskily and rightly emphasises the ineffectuality rather than the angelhood of the part ; this actress has the Tower to make purity gullible without making-it absurd. Mr. William Sylvester's lithe and lounging performance as the boy is marred only by an occasional self-consciousness in repose ; his face, as it were, is too ready to fold its arms.
Mr. Reece Pemberton's multiple setting (which Mr. Glenville haq lit superbly) is more 'flexible than Mr. Jo Mielziner's in New York, and Mr. Paul Bowles' incidental music, transmitted through a loud- speaker imaginatively lodged in the theatre's dome, hangs on the
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