Theatre review: The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore

As a Tennessee Williams fan there's mixed emotions coming to a new production of a lesser- known play: He was so prolific there's always something new to discover, but if that prolonged burst of creativity owed something to his prodigious coke habit, the quality of some of the later plays seems to attest to it just as much. The Wikipedia page for this 1963 meditation on mortality and grief, thought to have been written in response to the terminal illness of his long-term partner, is essentially a list of how many times Williams wrote it, and it tanked, rewrote it, and it tanked worse, rewrote it as a film, and it tanked globally. But as well as simply wanting to tick another title off the list, there's always the hope that someone will do a Summer and Smoke, and reveal an almost-forgotten work as a misjudged classic with a revelatory production. Robert Chevara's take on The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore at Charing Cross Theatre is not that production.

Faded Southern Belle^TM Flora Goforth (Linda Marlowe) has done better than most of her companions in the Williams canon, and her four marriages have left her with money, jewellery, and a sprawling estate off the Amalfi Coast.

Here she's dying, possibly of lung cancer, but her staff and doctors have kept from her just how bad things are. In moments of comparative lucidity between the drink and painkillers, she dictates incoherent memoirs to her secretary Blackie (Lucie Shorthouse,) until a bedraggled young man breaks into the grounds and is attacked by the guard dogs. Having seen him through binoculars and quite fancied him, Flora allows Chris Flanders (Sanee Raval) to stay in one of the smaller villas to recuperate, despite his reputation as the Angel of Death: He befriends rich, dying old women to try and get into their wills. Although he's presumably very bad at it, because despite already having a long list of previous marks, he arrives at Flora's in rags and starving.

Given the play's notoriety it's obvious that much of the evening's failure has to be blamed on Williams' writing itself: Not a lot happens, especially in the interminable second act that mostly consists of Flora and Chris having an impenetrable philosophical argument that goes round in endless circles. Because she's almost as well-travelled as Marlowe's accent, Flora insists they have this discussion in a Japanese theme, with her dressed as a nonagenarian geisha and Chris as a samurai in a kimono, complete with sword (there's no apparent reason, other than that in one of the rewrites Williams decided the play was Kabuki.)

But Chevara's production absolutely isn't doing the play any favours either. In a modern-dress design from Nicolai Hart-Hansen that doesn't noticeably bring anything to the story, the cast drag out the action: I'm not sure if it's meant to be a Southern drawl or a nod to the Kabuki conceit, but everyone seems to be slurring their lines lifelessly, sapping what little energy there is in the piece. Raval in particular seems to be in slo-mo: I've seen actors step on each other's lines before, but his pauses are so long that Marlowe and Shorthouse are sometimes halfway through the next scene by the time he starts talking again.

Thank goodness, then, for Sara Kestelman as Connie, the Witch of Capri (real last name unclear, because she gets married so often it's hard to keep up,) who arrives to update Flora on who her new guest really is, exchange some bitchy comments, and possibly bang the hot cabana boy (Matteo Johnson) while she's there. She's the only one to inject some life into her dialogue, and actually get some laughs from the witty barbs that Williams does pepper throughout the script. But she's not on stage anywhere near enough to salvage a confused, confusing play that's too dull to even elicit much so-bad-it's-good entertainment value*.

The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore by Tennessee Williams is booking until the 22nd of October at Charing Cross Theatre.

Running time: 2 hours 20 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Nick Haeffner.

*except for when I got the giggles at the delivery of the line "There's a time for kissing and a time................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... [ throws down cigarette] ...................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... not for kissing."