Edinburgh International Festival: The city that inspired countless songs and literary works was home, in 1939, to one Tennessee Williams. Now the 'memory' play inspired by his sojourn in the old French Quarter is being reinvented

Published on Friday 26 March 2010 18:23

THE final, impersonal line spoken in Tennessee Williams's rarely-performed "memory" play, Vieux Carré, is: "The house is empty now." The dwelling in question is the squalid rooming house at 722 Toulouse Street, in the old French Quarter of New Orleans, in which the play is set – and where the playwright lodged in a third-floor apartment for little more than a month in 1939, although the dilapidated boarding house long remained a fixture in his imagination, inspiring one-act p

"Actually, the house is not empty now; it's occupied by the New Orleans Historical Society," says American actress Kate Valk, who plays one of Williams's vulnerable, fatally-diseased females in a new production of the play being staged by New York's irreverent experimental theatre troupe, the Wooster Group. The show sees the Woosters' return to the Edinburgh International Festival following their 2008 adaptation of the baroque opera La Didone.

Vieux Carr is peopled by a cast of lost and tortured lonely hearts: a voyeuristic, omnipresent landlady, Mrs Wire; The Writer (Williams himself); Jane Sparks (Valk's character), "a lady, fallen, yes but… not a whore"; Tye, a vulgar strip-joint barker; a dying painter, Nightingale; and Mary Maude and Miss Carrie, two decayed gentlewomen who are politely starving in the attic.

"Everyone in this play is either sick or dying," remarks Valk cheerfully, speaking from New York's Public Library where she's been doing research in her free time between performances of the company's revival of North Atlantic, their 1983 song-and-dance spectacular. We discuss the famous 1977 Life magazine photo shoot Williams did when he returned to the Vieux Carr of New Orleans – his "spiritual home" – and the house where he'd once lived, only to find much of the interior had been destroyed. "He said, 'This house was occupied once. In my mind it still is, but by shadowy occupants like ghosts'," says Valk.

The award-winning performer, who is 52, knows all about ghosts. Indeed, she maintains that she's only ever played one role, that of a revenant, in decades with the avant-garde group, which takes its name from its base in Wooster Street – a Soho thoroughfare where they engineer their "theatre of irony" at the Performance Garage.

"This ghostly role is a through line for me, a trajectory and a shade, a facilitator, a medium, all those things. For me, it's an extension of who I am, which is wonderful for an actor," she says.

Often described as the ensemble's most "sublime" performer, Valk has appeared in every innovative, inventive and impudent Wooster production since she met the artistic director Elizabeth LeCompte and her then husband, the late Spalding Gray, 30 years ago.

"Only with the Woosters could I work like this, always from the outside in," she says. "Once I find the shoes, the face, the clothes I have my mask, my ghost. I'm not that facile that I could actually work with other companies anyway. Nowhere else would I have so much power." The Wooster Group are famous for interrogating the texts on which they work. Valk remembers LeCompte once calling herself an archaeologist. "She, well, we like to dig up everything we can find about the piece we're doing, facts about the playwright, the characters, movies based on the work, the iconography and literature it's created, all that stuff."

"All that stuff" has entailed several visits to New Orleans, which they found profoundly moving in the wake of the devastation of Hurricane Katrina.

"We wanted to go there to support the people, whose spirit is amazing, and to spend money, too, to help them," says Valk, whose emotional words are echoed by another of the company's long-term regulars, Brooklyn-based Ari Fliakos – familiar to TV audiences for his roles in Law & Order: Criminal Intent and Damages. Fliakos, 37, plays the central role of The Writer, giving a "flawless" performance, according to the drama critic of French newspaper Libration, which reviewed an early version of the production in Paris last November.

The show that comes to Edinburgh will be the same but very different, say both Valk and Fliakos almost in unison. In New Orleans, the troupe visited St Anna's Residence, an old people's home, where they "auditioned" and filmed elderly ladies for the roles of Williams's "beloved crones," Mary Maude and Miss Carrie, characters who will appear on film.

One of the company's stylistic signatures is video imagery, often drawing from other versions of a piece. In Vieux Carr they are employing the seamy improvised films of Paul Morrissey, produced by Andy Warhol in the 1970s, in addition to the re-editing techniques and manipulations of media artist Ryan Trecartin. And, as ever, there will be potent use of music.

"Music is integral to this production," says Fliakos, adding that in New Orleans they would walk around the jazzy French Quarter and suddenlyhear someone playing If I Didn't Care or Paper Moon, songs that Williams has homosexual Nightingale singing softly in an early scene in the play.

When the actors and LeCompte visited St Anna's, they listened as the old ladies sang "Bye, bye blues, Don't cry blues…" etc. "What was so touching," says Valk, "was the fact they knew all the words of all these old songs. When they read the words of the play it was beautiful".

We conclude by noting the fact that this production uses clips from Morrissey's 1972 film, Heat, which has an award-winning performance by double Oscar-nominated Sylvia Miles – Mrs Wire in the 1978 UK production of Vieux Carr for which she was nominated for an Olivier award.

"What an amazing coincidence!" exclaims Valk. "We all adore Sylvia in Heat, but I'd no idea she'd been in Vieux Carr. I wonder whether she felt the way I do about this play. Working on it has been so languorous." Then she sighs rapturously, the archetypal fading belle.

&#149 Vieux Carr is at the Royal Lyceum Theatre, Saturday 21 August until Tuesday 24 August.

&#149 Supported by the Embassy of the United States, London.