Celebrating Tennessee Williams with a rose tattoo

Tennessee Williams’ play The Rose Tattoo will be staged at the Manoel Theatre at the end of the month.

Combining comedic elements with hints of tragedy in its emotional range, The Rose Tattoo tells the story of a strikingly attractive widow, Serafina delle Rose, whose touching love for her husband, Rosario, crumbles when after his death she finds out he had been two-timing her.

The matter is further compounded when Rosario’s lover, Estelle, asks Serafina to make a shirt for a man she’s deeply in love with, whom Serafina instinctively knows to be her disingenuous husband.

The whole context is compounded when the audience learns that there has also been Mafia drug running.

Lending itself to the title of the play, The Rose Tattoo functions as an important symbol in a play that can be appreciated on different levels. It encompasses love, vulnerability, deception, fragility and sexual repression.

In his notebooks, Williams states: “The Rose Tattoo is my love-play to the world…” However, the play is also about Psyche’s birth in Serafina.

The urn, one of the quintessentials containing feminine symbols, harbours Serafina’s submerged true self.

In Rosario, Serafina idealises a love that is marked by ignorance and its loss sets the main character on the initiatory path to the possibility of the integration of the self.

In trying to stifle her daughter’s blossoming sexuality, Serafina is also a latter-day Demeter, ravaged as she is with unexpressed grief.

Dominic Dromgoole, The Sunday Times of London theatre critic, observed that Williams’ plays overflowed with the deepest of human emotions, the search for ways to express sexuality and melancholyin a repressive and staid context, which in turn leads to a lessrepressive ambience.

Williams does this by presenting a strong female lead, who Anna Magnani played in the 1955 screen version that, contrary to his previous female protagonisits in The Glass Menagerie and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, is strong, warm and earthy.

Yet, the similarities are still there – Serafina is also a wounded William’s woman, she just has more courage than the rest.

The production celebrates the centenary of Williams’ birth and the 60th anniversary of its premiere on Broadway.

The Rose Tattoo will be performed at the Manoel Theatre,Valletta, on May 20, 21 and 22with Jane Marshall, Kris Spiteri, Sharon Bezzina, Marvic Cordina, Mary Rose Mallia and John Grech in the leading roles. The play is directed by Albert Marshall.