Perhaps the whole show should have been done like Chicago, with the band on stage throughout. Having hit this level of excitement, they revisit Nutbush City Limits and Proud Mary from the first half, making the previous versions pale into insignificance. No one hears the comparatively honest simplicity of her attitude towards Sebastian (“He liked me and so I loved him”), nor her insight when it comes to human relationships in general: “We all use each other and that’s what we think of as love.” No one seems to take into account the fact that she was raped. Poor Catharine is deemed insane and left to bounce between asylum walls. Giblin gives us a Mrs Venable who relishes the suffering of others like some do rare steak, her drool all but visible as she contemplates it. She was his muse, an almost holy function, and she in turn idealises him to the point of idolatry.īoth Mrs Venable (Belinda Giblin) and her niece Catharine (Andrea Demetriades) are trapped inside their own imaginations, and neither place has a welcome mat at the door. In her own mind she alone understood his peculiar temperament as a poet – even if he only wrote one poem a year, and kept that much a secret from the world. He was the sun and moon of her life, and someone is going to pay for this loss, regardless of the details of his death. Mrs Venable (think “venal”) has lost her only son, Sebastian. Andrea Demetriades stars as Catharine in Suddenly Last Summer at Ensemble Theatre.
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