THEATRE REVIEW: The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore - Charing Cross Theatre, London.

Premiered in 1963,  'Milk Train...' announced the decline of Williams’ playwriting career: he’d had flops early on, but from 'The Glass Menagerie' up to 'The Night Of The Iguana', his stage works had usually managed to find an audience and had regularly been filmed (as was 'Milk Train'....later adapted into the Burton-Taylor camp classic Boom!).  After 1963, his plays rarely exercised either critics or audiences, though these later works are by no means without value: right to the end, Williams retained his gift for imaginative, poetic dialogue matched to earthy, not to say sleazy situations.

'Milk Train' presents us with an archetypal Williams set up: a dying Deep South multi-millionairess, Flora Goforth, residing on Italy’s Amalfi coast, is dictating the memoirs of her colourful life to Blackie, her put-upon secretary. She is visited by a young poet, who may or may not be the Angel of Death: the gossip mill reports that he’s recently brought ‘comfort’ to several rich women who have shortly afterwards expired.  But is he the real deal, or just another adventurer?  

We never find out for certain, as the ending is cloaked in Williams’s trademark ambiguity (and nothing wrong with that); along the way though, the play has much to recommend it - not least the dialogue and a marvellous central section in which Goforth and the ‘angel’ (named ‘Christopher Flanders’) lay each other’s souls bare - it’s hard not to feel this is distinctly lesser Williams, a man unsure of where he was going and not the confident artist of 'Streetcar Named Desire' or 'Cat On A Hot Tin Roof'. 

At the Charing Cross Theatre, it receives an uncertain production from Robert Chevara: on press night, though the cast performed scrupulously and strenuously, one had a sense of actors still searching for their characters. Linda Marlowe’s Goforth, though entirely credible as a misplaced plutocrat, was not as believable as the ex-bump-and-grind-girl who’d come into her early fortune through an advantageous Anna-Nicole Smith-type marriage to an elderly tycoon (who then died, leaving her loaded). The performance needs more vulgarity, a more loving embrace of the character’s grotesqueries if it is to work - it also needs, in common with the rest of the cast, greater volume and projection, particularly when competing against the rumbling trains from overhead. Had I not already been familiar with the play, I’d have barely a clue about what was going on.  

As the dubious poet Flanders, Sanee Raval matches Williams’ description but doesn’t seem to have made up his own mind about what he is or represents: this is crucial if the performance is to have definition, the sense of a someone knowing more (or pretending to know more) than anyone else in the play. As a consequence, the play’s major scene in Act Two, doesn’t have the impact it ideally should have.  

The Witch of Capri is a gift of a part, and one that could easily steal the evening (in an early bit of reverse gender casting, Noel Coward played the part in the film!) but Sara Kestelman’s performance suffers from the same tentativeness that afflicts her colleagues. Lucie Shorthouse as the beleaguered Blackie impresses in what is a somewhat one-note role. Nicolai Hart-Hansen’s design make the most of the space, though they can’t convey the suggested luxury of Goforth’s coastal eyrie. Hopefully as the run progresses and the ensemble gels, press night awkwardness will fade and the production gain in confidence.  

Reviewer - Paul Ashcroft
on - 3.10.22