An indelible portrayal of love

Theatre
The Rose Tattoo
Manoel Theatre

Strength of spirit is tied to human emotion. Nowhere is this more evident than when the passions of love take us completely in their sway and torment us even after death. Tennessee Williams’s 1951 play The Rose Tattoo put up last week as a joint collaboration between the Malta Drama Centre, the US embassy and the Manoel Theatre itself, is a very good example of how love and passion give not only motivation, but also affect our better judgement.

Jane Marshall played the lead role of Serafina Delle Rose, a colourful and headstrong Sicilian émigré to the US, who is very happily married and very much in love with her husband, Rosario. She spends all day working hard at her dressmaking business while telling her friends and neighbours, chief of whom is Assunta, played convincingly by Anna Bassily, that she is expecting her second child – a gift she knew of at conception from the sign she believes she was given when her husband’s rose tattoo appeared momentarily on her breast.

The significance of the rose tattoo itself is clearly marked at the onset, and later that day, when Assunta returns with the neighbourhood women bearing the very bad news of Rosario’s death in a road accident, Serafina’s life is changed forever. Ms Marshall gave an excellent performance as Serafina, who loses none of her Mediterranean passion even in grief, where after three years, she has become a withdrawn social recluse, yet in her interactions with others, she is more than willing to bare herself emotionally. With a very verbose script, Ms Marshall’s energy managed to keep the pace going from start to finish while maintaining clarity and handled her characterisation extremely well, especially for such a formidable spirit as Serafina’s – which is by no means an easy part to interpret.

The problem with a play whose setting is in an Italo-American neighbourhood, is that getting the accent right and keeping it consistent for the entirety of the performance is very hard. While Ms Marshall in the lead managed this well, several other characters were not always clear, making it at times a struggle to follow exactly what they were saying, or to sustain our credibility in their character.

Sharon Bezzina, who played Rosa, Serafina’s daughter, did suffer a little from this uneven accenting, as did John Grech, who played Jack Hunter, her love interest – fluctuating from Italo-American to a more neutral English tonality. What worked well for them, however, was their very earnest and heartfelt portrayal of two young people in love, on the brink of a journey which from Serafina’s perspective is already over for her – left as she is, with only her memories and regret for having lost the love of her life. But idolisation never pays off and in one of the best scenes in the performance, where Stephanie Bugeja and Gianella Mazzola play Flora and Bessie respectively – two rather haughty young women who visit Serafina’s business on the way to New Orleans to pick up a blouse, tempers become frayed and the ugly truth will out.

Retaliating to Serafina’s scorn at their loose attitude to men and love, where she accuses them of never knowing what true passion is, using her relationship with Rosario as a goal to aspire to; Flora tells Serafina that her late husband wasn’t the saint she believed him to be and that he was unfaithful to her with Marvic Cordina’s Estelle, who played the part of a grieving mistress convincingly. Both Ms Bugeja and Ms Mazzola made the most of their one scene and created a great dynamic with Ms Marshall’s strong stage presence.

Kris Spiteri’s Alvaro, who later appears on Serafina’s doorstep and gets into a fight with Erin Stewart Tanti’s Salesman, did a very good job of creating a “new Rosario” – his strong and sensitive delivery was genuine and provided a strong male counterpart for Serafina. His physical resemblance to Rosario intrigues Serafina who invites him in, setting up an entirely new dynamic which leaves her feeling confused for the first time since she became disillusioned with the revered ashes of her dead husband, in her discovery of his unfaithfulness. Love later flourishes when Alvaro returns to reveal a similar rose tattoo on his chest, even though Serafina questions his motivation in wanting to be with her. Once she allows hope to quell her bitterness and suspicion, she relents and her attempts at keeping Rosa and Jack apart are thwarted both by Jack’s honourable behaviour and the realisation that love has not forsaken her. Her initially reluctant consent to their relationship becomes earnest and joyful in the end, when she too discovers that she can begin to live again rather than dwell on the past.

The ensemble cast for Williams’s play is undoubtedly large. With minor roles like those of the neighbourhood women played by Lorna Fiorini (Peppina), Yvette Buhagiar (Violetta), Graziella Galea Pirotta (Giuseppina) and Christine Briffa Francalanza (Mariella), serving the purpose of creating the provincial Sicilian atmosphere within a suburban American setting – where people gossip and go about their daily lives while being fully involved in their neighbours’ lives. Renato Dimech’s Padre De Leo and Maryrose Mallia’s Strega also added the religious and supernatural element to the story, which is echoed in Serafina’s implorations to the Madonna for a sign and her subsequent visions of the rose tattoo on her breast.

The choice of set and appropriate costumes certainly helped evoke the right historical feel and moralistic tone of the decade, which director Albert Marshall used to his advantage in clashing with Serafina’s emotionally-driven diatribe against the world. It is certainly not easy to handle such a large cast, but add a troupe of child extras and a live goat-kid and the sheer complexity of the choreography of the whole production suddenly comes into focus.

What I particularly liked was the relative isolation of the main characters in the manner in which they were blocked around the set – weaving their personal life-story into the fabric of daily life, while setting it apart due to its dramatic energy. This significant post-war piece directed the audience’s attention to the emotional connections which pervade the fabric of human life and drew our perspective towards the importance of love in our existence, proving that a critically acclaimed classic playwright of the 20th century still has the power to move us.