US Edition 
Sweet Bird of Youth, at Old Vic
Marianne Elliott's revival of Tennessee Williams’s tragedy, starring Kim Cattrall and Seth Numrich, recalls an episode of Terry and June, says Tim Walker.
At 56, Kim Cattrall has intimated that she considers herself to be too young to play Alexandra Del Lago, the “cougar” who has her claws into a hunk essayed by Seth Numrich in Sweet Bird of Youth. A mere three decades come between her and her co-star, but, as ungentlemanly as it may sound, I have to say she looks perfectly believable in the role.
Whether the Sex and the City star manages to get under the skin of the film actress, who is unable to come to terms with the passage of time, I am not so sure. There is a strange sitcom-ish feel to the opening scene, in which she awakes in a hotel room in a Gulf Coast town, unable to recall how she got there and why she slept with a young man named Chance (Numrich).
The laughter from the punters at Tuesday night’s performance ought to have alarmed all concerned: this is Tennessee Williams’s tragedy being played out as Terry and June.
It is true that some of the lines are mildly amusing, but there is supposed to be a bitter edge to them that neither of the principals could communicate. “I used to be the best looking boy in this town,” drawls Mr Numrich. Laconically, Miss Cattrall responds: “How big is this town?” More bawls of laughter.
It doesn’t help that Miss Cattrall sports what appears to be a flame-haired wig on loan from the estate of the late Noele Gordon. She hasn’t any of the fading grandeur that the part requires, and, when it comes to the sexual chemistry between her and her co-star, David Cameron and Nick Clegg beat them hands down. Still, Mr Numrich’s six-pack is going to be a fair bet for best supporting role at next year’s Oliviers.
Rae Smith creates an improbable hotel bedroom for the pair: there are eight classical pillars running along its sides and what appears to be a self-contained penthouse suite just above. This may well make life easier for the stage hands when it comes to shifting the action to a plantation house – all that was necessary was to remove the bed and curtains – but Miss Smith needs to recognise that there has to be an intrinsic logic to the design for each scene.
As for the supporting players, Owen Roe is a particular disappointment as Boss Finley, the local white supremacist who bears an understandable grudge against Chance for giving his daughter (Louise Dylan, virtually comatose) a sexually transmitted disease. Boss Finley is supposed to be a terrifying character, but Roe, who has a habit of turning beetroot red when he gets angry, makes him seem a lot more like Boss Hogg out of The Dukes of Hazzard.
A Tennessee Williams play, if it is done properly, ought to shock, but on this basis, the director Marianne Elliott, who numbers War Horse and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time among her credits, fails dismally.
Society has always permitted old men to run off with young women, but in the Fifties, when this play was written, the reverse was considered unseemly. In the Lord Chamberlain’s office at the time, earnest memos were written about Williams “vomiting up” his plays. There was special concern about a recurring character in his work: “the gentlewoman debased, sunk in her private dreams as a remedy for her sexual frustration...”
Social mores have, of course, moved on a lot since those days, but, done well, this play can still prove a valuable dissertation on the business of ageing. It can be eloquent testimony, too, to the callousness that lurks inside all of us.
This three-hour long production is, however, singularly unilluminating. It occurs to me that Terry Pratchett’s observation that “inside every old person is a young person wondering what happened” is a fair enough summary of what it is all about. But, typically, that old boy could say it a lot more amusingly – and a lot more succinctly.
Old Vic, to Aug 31; oldvictheatre.com