Suddenly Last Summer
★★★☆☆ Well acted
Assembly Roxy: Tues 24 – Fri 27 Jun 2025
Review by Hugh Simpson
Edinburgh Graduate Theatre Group’s Suddenly Last Summer upstairs at the Roxy has excellent performances, but some less than ideal staging.
The 1957 one-act play by Tennessee Williams was not seen either on Broadway or the West End until the 90s, partly due to some of its content being seen as unsuitable for the time.
Caden Scott and Helen Goldie in EGTG’s Suddenly Last Summer. Pic: Robin Mair.
Set in a sweltering New Orleans garden in the 1936, Suddenly Last Summer shows Mrs Venable, a redoubtable Southern matriarch, who is attempting to save the reputation of her late son Sebastian.
In particular, Mrs Venable wants a doctor to perform a lobotomy on Sebastian’s cousin Catharine, whom she has had placed in a private mental hospital in order to suppress Catharine’s stories about how Sebastian actually died.
The play relies heavily on symbolism. This, combined with the fact that Sebastian is its central character yet never appears on stage, can make it come across as an overheated slice of Southern Gothic, or even melodramatic.
utterly convincing performances
In order to cohere, it needs to have utterly convincing performances by the actors playing Mrs Venable and Catharine, both of whom have to carry long sections of the play with huge stretches of monologue.
Linda Orr, Kirsty McColm and Sinclair Davis in EGTG’s Suddenly Last Summer. Pic: Robin Mair.
This is certainly the case here. Helen Goldie’s Mrs Venable is magnetic – tightly wound, with a veneer of politeness never really hiding her anger.
Kirsty McColm presents Catharine as deeply troubled and desperate to be believed. Catherine’s ‘vision’ as she recounts Sebastian’s fate is done with the utmost credibility.
The other characters have comparatively little to do, but are all performed with considerable skill. Caden Scott’s Dr Cukrowicz has an icy affability, Linda Orr gives Catharine’s mother the necessary distracted air, and Sinclair Davis has a suitably childish petulance as Catharine’s brother George. Katey Warran (Sister Felicity) and SaraBeth Samuels (Foxhill) both give underwritten roles their full attention.
overthought
Director Ross Hope (assisted by Emma Carter and Abbye Eva) has managed to knit the ensemble together well, and the accents in particular are remarkably consistent. However, some of the direction seems to have been overthought.
The way that the characters react to what is happening on stage is obviously the product of much consideration, but has been taken too far. During Catharine’s recounting of the events of the previous summer, some of the facial expressions behind her catch the audience’s eye just too much.
Sinclair Davis, SaraBeth Samuels and Helen Goldie in EGTG’s Suddenly Last Summer. Pic: Robin Mair.
There are other elements of the staging that are decidedly ill-advised. A commendable desire to utilise the whole auditorium leads to too many entrances and exits in odd places.
In particular, having characters upstairs from the audience simply does not work, with sections of dialogue performed behind (and above) the audience’s backs. This would be bad enough in any theatre, but the lecture-hall style bench seating of the Roxy Upstairs makes it even worse. There are two choices – swivel uncomfortably and risk a crick in the neck, or just accept that you can’t see anything. This is the case for the opening section of the play, which is simply distracting. When characters climb the stairs several times, it goes well beyond inconvenience and threatens to derail the play.
portentousness
Similarly, Gordon Hughes’s lighting draws attention to its own dramatic nature a little too often. Dug Campbell’s sound design works much better, with its animal noises or percussion bands more of an ominous underscoring.
Throughout, there is also that air of portentousness that often afflicts productions of Williams – the idea that this is all poetic and Very Important, and must be treated with extreme reverence. This leads to a glacial pace, with an already lengthy one-act play taking over 100 minutes, which does try the patience of the audience somewhat.
The fine performances of the cast, however, make up for any other shortcomings.
Running time: One hour 40 minutes (no interval)
Assembly Roxy (Upstairs), 2 Roxburgh Place, EH8 9SU
Tuesday 24 – Friday 27 June 2025
Daily at 7.30 pm
Details and tickets: Book here.
EGTG Website: https://theegtg.com/
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Linda Orr, Sinclair Davis, SaraBeth Samuels, Caden Scott and Helen Goldie in EGTG’s Suddenly Last Summer. Pic: Robin Mair.ENDS
