Tennessee Williams lived a colourful life after his birth in 1911 in Mississippi, brought up in a dysfunctional family. Although much away from home as a travelling salesman, his father was a dictatorial presence. His grandfather was a clergyman in the southern fire and brimstone tradition. The family provided the characters for his plays, if not the content, with overbearing patriarchs, fading belles and men who were either brutish sexual predators or beautiful, frail young men. From his grandfather's sermons, suffered by Tennessee in his childhood, came the dramatic language of his plays with their glimpses of paradise and purgatory.

His education was interrupted by financial hardship during the Depression, but he later resumed his studies at the University of Iowa, where he graduated in 1938 with a degree in dramatic writing. His earliest plays had been performed by amateur groups and he broke into New York professional theatre with The Glass Menagerie in 1945. He began writing Summer and Smoke in 1945, but it was not performed until after his sensational breakthrough with Pulitzer prize-winning A Streetcar Named Desire in 1947, when the play and playwright, together with the stage performances of Marlon Brando as Stanley Kowalski and Jessica Tandy as Blanche DuBois became household names. The director, Elia Kazan, took Streetcar from the stage to the screen, but Warner Brothers would tolerate only an emaciated version of the play, considering the unexpurgated script too erotic for the cinema. Nevertheless, the film was notable for the performances of Brando and of Vivien Leigh, who won an Oscar and went on to create Blanche on the London stage, directed by her husband, Laurence Olivier.

Williams claimed he wrote, "to capture, somehow, the constantly evanescent quality of existence." The narrator in The Glass Menagerie states that he is the opposite of a stage magician who gives "the illusion with the appearance of truth. I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion". Williams said, "I want magic not reality." His leading female characters are neurasthenic, with pent-up sexual frustration which dare not be expressed. Alma, the clergyman's repressed daughter in Summer and Smoke, is from the same mould as Blanche Dubois, although the events are closer to the gentler melodrama of The Glass Menagerie than to Streetcar.

There is a long-held theory that Williams revealed his own sexual hang-ups through his main characters, although countless actresses have said that few playwrights have written such good parts for women.

His death in 1983, in Hotel Elysee on New York's Fifth Avenue, was as extraordinary as his life, choking on the cap of a bottle of eye drops. He was wont to hold the cap in his teeth while applying the drops. His gagging reflex may have been hampered by drink or drugs.

There have been a number of productions of his plays at the GWT but we have never seen Summer and Smoke until now. London first saw the play at the Lyric, Hammersmith, with Margaret Johnstone in 1951, followed by a West End transfer and there was a successful revival in 2006 with Rosamund Pike at the Apollo Theatre. There is also an American film version with Geraldine Fitzgerald.

BILL BRAY

"Everything in his life is in his plays, and everything in his plays is in his life."

So wrote Elia Kazan, director of many of Tennessee Williams's plays, of an artist for whom life was just too painful and much of that troubled life is to be found in Summer and Smoke: his reprobate shoe-salesman father, his strict clergyman grandfather, his mentally disturbed sister and his fears for his own sanity, his repressed sexuality, his self-disgust and his struggles with depression, alcohol and drugs. Williams wrote: "We are all sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life", and perhaps he is essentially the poet of inner loneliness, of the dark night of the soul, of the "enormous silence" that is for him the human condition.

Like many of his characters, his life was a quest to escape from this condition, and from his background, but with no clear idea of where the journey might end. His escape route was his writing. He wrote Summer And Smoke shortly after his first great masterpiece The Glass Menagerie, another play of escape from stultified lives and hopes unfulfilled. And of all the great characters he created, he always said his favourite was Alma Winemiller from Summer And Smoke; she is the one he most identified with. He wrote several versions of her story, from an early draft called The Anatomy Chart to the later Eccentricities of a Nightingale. It was as if he never gave up on her struggles, as he continued to wrestle with his own demons.

But there is laughter amid the pain. This is not a solemn play. Williams's wry and compassionate observation of the characters who people this and stifling Southern town, of their attitudes and foibles, brings us a bittersweet humour reminiscent of Chekhov.

Leading our strong cast are Susie Hall and Ben Gaston, with support from many GWT stalwarts, as well as relative newcomers: Eileen Brookes, Roger Gollop, Michael Martin, Lesley Robins, Scott Shearer, Aysev Ismail, Catherine Addy, Keith Dunn, Ellie Martin, Mathew Webb and Tony Gurney, not to mention our talented child actors Jade Hall, Kirsty Hawkins, Oliver Baldwin and Louis Dowse.

JOHN TURNBULL (Director)