The Dark at the Top of the Stairs, Belgrade Theatre

[dutchman]

William Inge's 1957 drama The Dark at the Top of the Stairs still looks impressively outspoken in this rare revival at Coventry's Belgrade Theatre, writes Dominic Cavendish.


Olivia Vinall as Reenie and Caroline Faber as Cora

A critic who became a successful playwright and later got so bruised by reviews as his career subsided that he ended up committing suicide at the age of 60, William Inge has become one of the forgotten heroes of 20th-century American theatre.

The Glass Menagerie, the play that inspired him to turn to drama and made him a friend and protégé of Tennessee Williams, keeps coming around, but The Dark at the Top of the Stairs – which has much in common with Williams’s breakthrough hit – is hardly ever revived.

Full marks, then, to director Lisa Forrell and the Belgrade in Coventry for letting us see a work that enjoyed a Broadway run in 1957, staged by Elia Kazan, and was subsequently made into a film starring Angela Lansbury. If it doesn’t entirely escape the shadows cast by Williams’s masterpiece, its handling of vexed questions about marital breakdown, sexual awakening, parenting and prejudice still looks impressively outspoken even by today’s standards, while the play’s preoccupation with money, and what happens to relationships when there isn’t enough of it, feels incredibly apposite right now.

Rubin Flood (an imposingly stern Andrew Whipp) is a hatchet-faced horse-harness salesman grown bitter after 17 years of a sexless marriage – his sense of emasculation heightened by the oil millionaires springing up around him in 1920s Oklahoma. His plaintive wife, Cora (Caroline Faber, flickering brilliantly with uncertainty), can’t stop him flouncing off when they wrangle about the dollars she’s lavished on a party dress for their painfully shy daughter Reenie and about the floozy she thinks he’s seeing out on the road. Retreating upstairs, Reenie’s withdrawal from the world is matched by the hypersensitivity of her brother Sonny, whom Cora treats with Oedipal degrees of smothering love.

With the arrival of another figure of aching adolescent vulnerability – a Jewish gentleman caller who whisks the pretty wallflower off to a party, while attracting latent erotic attention from Sonny, too – Inge ups the melodrama. Yet thanks to terrific, truthful playing all round – with especially laudable performances from fresh-faced Philip Labey and Olivia Vinall as the frustrated mummy’s boy and his introverted sibling – the production, beautifully designed by Ruari Murchison, pumps deep reserves of recognisable anguish to the surface.

Forrell and her team may not have struck pure theatrical gold, but what they’ve homed in on is darkly compelling all the same.