Summer and Smoke
First things first: how great is it to see a Tom Scutt design in action again?! I sometimes worry that since he’s returned from his showbiz MTV exile he’s been kept under some kind of emprisonment spell by the Donmar and honestly, who goes to the Donmar?
You don’t really need me to talk about how beautiful Tom’s design is, how perfect the integration of the nine pianos into the text, or how fucking luscious the whole vibe of the whole production (Lee Curran’s firework lighting omg 😍) because you can get that from literally any other review, but let the record show that I concur on all counts. It’s a beaut.
Let’s be honest though, for a production this expansive, Summer and Smoke is still a bit of a first draft. The text feels short and stunted, like it was supposed to be a novel but he didn’t have time, so I found myself trying to think about it as episodic snapshots, rather than the rolling epic it seems to want to be. Which is fine, because just opening little windows onto a relationship like this, on a stage like this, lit as beautifully as this, is obviously great, but I’ve seen Lady Gaga videos with more developed narratives.
Maybe that is just a flippant way of saying I wanted to spend more time with it.
Maybe I’m just filling some space while I work up to telling you how fucking SEXY I found it all.
It was HOT. John Buchanan is one of those controlling, emotionally stunted arseholes who I spent my teenage years (and then some) fawning over, and even though I was basically hate-watching every single scene he was in, when he brushed her fringe aside to kiss her and said that line, like ‘so I don’t get hair in my mouth’, let me tell you I was a-tremble. Later my Clue app would tell me that I was pretty much ovulating right there in my seat as I was watching, which probably explains a lot, but oh man, he did it for me. There’s a John Martyn lyric, ‘curled around me, like a fern in the spring’, and that’s exactly how he stood over Alma. She was all rigid and nervous (Patsy Ferran really is something) but he was all strong and virile and somehow kinda thrusting and protective at the same time. Like, come take my pulse anytime doctor.
Also I loved how he literally couldn’t sit on chairs. He was crouching and squatting and sitting on the steps at the back of the stage and all that, but the one time he actually had to sit on a chair it was like instant awkward giantism. Proper embodied discomfort, and I don’t use the word embodied lightly.
It turns out I’ve seen the actor — Matthew Needham — in a whole bunch of stuff before and had no feminine stirrings to show for it, so I guess Williams knew what he was doing after all.
It’s worth saying that Rebecca Frecknall’s direction was very van Hove-y, the bare feet and bare stage direct descendants of A View From The Bridge, and she pulls it off beautifully. The whole feel of the thing is 👌 and you can’t just design that kind of tone/mood/whatever into a show. It’s so delicately made. What we really need now is for her to direct the alt version, the Rosa Gonzales story, easily the most interesting and underwritten character in the whole thing. Rosa fucks John but also has the balls to slap him round the face when he deserves it; she was born in a one-room house with a dirt floor, which she shared with her family and the geese, and she is basically the only character in the whole of Summer and Smoke who’s happy to just come out and say what she wants. I am so ready for the Wide Sargasso Sea version. #TeamRosa4eva.
And finally, since I’ve already linked to him once already, I’m gonna finish with the John Martyn version of Portishead’s Glory Box. Rosa sings Glory Box with a similar smooth jazz vibe in the first half of Summer and Smoke and I wanted MOREMOREMOREMORE. Basically, it was all great and beautiful and everything but I wish it’d had more Rosa, more music, and if it couldn’t have had more story, then at least it could give us more sex.
(This is objectively the worst music video of all time. I’m so sorry. Please, for your own good, if you want to listen to the song just press play and then minimise your window until it’s over.)
