As this is a Tennessee Williams play, expect violence.  As it is a very early, recently-discovered,  Williams play, expect the violence to take place on stage.  Later Williams was to learn that violence off-stage packs an even bigger punch; we do not see Blanche raped in "A Streetcar Named Desire" nor Sebastian eaten by urchins in "Suddenly Last Summer" (though we do in the movie, which Williams deplored).  In the prison setting of "Nightingales"  the violence reaches a climax in a long (possibly over-long) scene in which convicts are literally "baked" to death in a steam-heat-filled torture chamber.

As this is Williams, you may also expect lyricism, music,  and symbolism.  Answering criticism of his use of symbolism, Williams said with the self-disparagement that was one of his most endearing qualities, "Where would I be without my symbols?  Probably back working at the Continental Shoe Company in St. Louis."   Set in 1938, the play begins and ends with the Loreli excursion boat , its steam calliope playing "I'm forever blowing bubbles" backing the spiel of an announcer pointing out the sights along the river, including the island prison where the action is set.  The refrain of the song, when the bubbles burst, is sung in  snatches by tough inmate Butch, symbolizing his lost dreams, and the Loreli represents both the outsiders' conception of the prison as well as escape for Jim in the ambiguous ending.  "Canary" Jim is the most sympathetic and most fully rounded character , a sensitive man not unlike the 27-year-old author.  Jim voices his admiration of Keats and his hopes of writing poetry "not about nightingales" but on social themes.  He is a loner, despised by the other prisoners for collaborating with the cruel redneck warden  played by Colin Redgrave, an early version of Boss Finley in "Sweet Bird of Youth."

"Nightingales" is a seminal Williams play that began as an  assignment in E.C. Mabie's  playwriting class at the University of Iowa:  write a short play based on a newspaper article.  Williams wrote "Quit Eating," about an account of a prison hunger strike.  Leaving the university when Mabie failed to recommend him for a graduate scholarship, Williams returned home to St. Louis, where he read a news report about  convicts punished by confinement in a steam-heated airless room, where they were scalded to death.  (A blow-up of the 1938 newspaper item is exhibited in the lobby at Circle in the Square.)  He expanded his college one-act into the full-length "Not about Nightingales," and sent it off to the Group Theater in New York, which specialized in social protest plays like Clifford Odets' "Waiting for Lefty."  They rejected it, and Williams filed it away, evidently considering it unworthy when New Directions began publishing his plays.  However, in one of his essays, he mentions the play by its title,  and actress Vanessa Redgrave, who had appeared as Lady Torrance in an outstanding Broadway revival of "Orpheus Descending," began a search for the script, in London, Austin, Texas, and New York.  Successfully locating the script and its revisions, she and her brother Colin and their British acting company joined forces with the Alley Theater in Houston to present this play and Shakespeare's "Antony and Cleopatra" in Houston and at London's Royal National Theatre and thence in New York  

 Generally praised by the critics, "Not about Nightingales" holds its own as well-made and hard-hitting.  What distinguishes it are the typically Williams characteristics more skillfully developed in his later plays.  From the beginning,  Williams rejected the realistic theater of his day and campaigned for an expressionistic "plastic" theater that incorporated music, including refrains from popular songs;  artistic lighting, offstage voices and sound effects, dialogue that is heightened,  poetic, and significant; "legends" ( key words projected "magic-lantern-like" above or at the rear of the stage), and symbols.  All these earmarks of a Williams play appear in "Not About Nightingales."   Like the bubbles he sings of, the hopes of tough-guy Butch vanish as does his beloved dance-hall hostess Goldie, with  whom he dances in a poetic dream vision.  Here the lighting, suggesting the dance palace's turning, mirrored ball, encompasses the auditorium.   A tight formation  of eight stooped convicts marches through the audience on their way to and from their two cells, a microcosm of the vast numbers of incarcerated men bragged about by the Loreli announcer and represented by offstage noises --metallic bangings, catcalls, shouts, and contemptuous bird whistles heralding the approach of Canary Jim.  Offstage voices announce headlines as the prison scandal is finally revealed.  Short scenes end in blackouts. Against the background of repression, hopelessness, violence, and torture, is set the love  between Jim and  the prison secretary, a woman so desperate to hold her job in Depression times that she will submit to sexual advances from the despicable warden.

Two years after "Nightingales" was rejected, Williams had better luck with "Battle of Angels," its production recommended to the Theater Guild by playreader John Gassner.  But Williams was bitterly disappointed when the Guild closed "Angels" in Boston after unfavorable reviews by critics schooled in realism and baffled by a dramatic technique that they would later praise.   Williams never forgot or forgave the producers of "Angels" for their summary dismissal of him.  Forty years later his autobiographical  play "Something Cloudy, Something Clear" depicted himself as a young playwright, August, broke and struggling to rewrite his prospective Broadway  play to please the producer, Laurence Langner, thinly disguised as Fidler.   Interrupted by two young people as he sits at his typewriter,  August explains, "I was about  to make a concession to the taste of someone else, a powerful man with practically no taste."  (Williams also never forgot "Battle of Angels," which he continued to rewrite for seventeen years until it finally made it to Broadway in 1957 as "Orpheus Descending.")

Although "Angels" failed, Williams was hired by Hollywood to write films.  When his script for a Lana Turner movie was turned  down by the studio,  he offered them a screenplay based on his short story about a family, "Portrait of a Girl in Glass."  They rejected that too.  In 1945 it opened on Broadway as "The Glass Menagerie."  The rest is history.

The role of Tennessee Williams’s Lady Torrance, a shopkeeper in a small Southern town in the fifties, is one every middle-aged actress covets.  But it demands great versatility to change from a frumpy, disillusioned, hard-faced cynic to a vibrant, joyful woman brimming with life and love.  Mirren achieves all this and more, becoming the definitive Lady Torrance for this writer, who has seen in the role Anna Magnani (for whom Williams wrote it), Maureen Stapleton, and several forgettable ones in between. Mirren convinces us that Lady, at first dubious and distrusting of stranger Val, really does fall in love with this modern-day guitar-playing Orpheus who rescues her from the hell in which she has been living, or partly living.

“Orpheus Descending” is a rewrite of Williams’s first professionally produced play, “Battle of Angels,” which the Theatre Guild presented in Boston in 1940 with Miriam Hopkins as the Southern heroine.  The Guild summarily closed the play when it received unfavorable reviews, partly due to the steamy subject matter and partly to the auditorium filling with smoke from the fire with which the play ends. Williams worked on the play for seventeen years, off and on, revising it as “Orpheus Descending,” which opened on Broadway in 1957.  He rewrote Lady as an Italian-American, a role he created for film star Anna Magnani, who declined to appear on stage but can be seen in the movie version, “The Fugitive Kind.”

Despite the suspicions of the small-minded citizens of the town and the put-downs of her dying husband Jabe, Lady is a survivor, operating the Torrance Mercantile Store and hiring drifter-guitarist Val as a salesman.  Her affair with Val transforms Lady from a joyless, tough, loveless woman to a loving one.  Their dialogue is typical of Williams at his best – humorous, pointed, true-to-life, but lifted into the realm of poetry.  She is interviewing Val for the job:

 Lady:   You had any sales experience?

 Val:      All my life I been selling something to someone.

Lady:    So’s everybody.  You got any character reference
            on you?

 Val:      I have this – letter.

Buying and selling is one of the metaphors of the play.  When Lady was eighteen, her father “sold” her to the older Jabe, now a figure of Death as Lady’s flower-decked confectionary, opening on Easter, is a symbol of life and resurrection.  Commented Williams, “Some critics resent my symbols, but let me ask, what would I do without them?  Without my symbols I might still be employed by the International Shoe Company in St. Louis.”

            As Val, Stuart Townsend is convincing if somewhat restrained, especially in his passage about the little bird that sleeps on the wing, another symbol, as Lady both doubts yet longs for the freedom the bird represents.  Richard Durden makes the bitter and hating Jabe truly frightening, a devil in the hell where Lady is confined.  Saskia Reeves as the nymphomaniac Carol (Cassandra) is as convincing as any actress can be in this overwritten role.  Hytner’s direction of the townspeople is excellent, surrounding the principals with threatening, bigoted men and gossiping, small-minded women.  Bob Crowley has done wonders with the Donmar stage, surrounded on three sides by the audience.  He creates a gray and forbidding store, stacked with shoeboxes, and cleverly places the “confectionary” offstage, depicted by a string of colored lights leading to it.

 “The Fugitive Kind,” the film of “Orpheus Descending” was shot in Milton, a small town in upstate New York, to which I drove on July 26, 1959, for an interview with Williams.  He had nothing but praise for Anna Magnani and felt she embodied the spirit of Lady, confessing that he had her in mind when he rewrote the play. Gentleman that he was, Williams was reticent when questioned about Marlon Brando as Val.  Two years later in an article in Life Magazine Williams revealed why:  “Brando’s offbeat timing and his slurred pronunciation . . . were torture for Anna who had to wait and wait for her cue, and when she received it, it would not be the one in the script.”  Williams felt that the film was “mutilated by that uncontrollable demon of competitiveness in an actor too great, if he knew it, to resort to such self-protective devices.”