Blind Date & 27 Wagons Full of Cotton at Riverside Studios

Blind Date & 27 Wagons Full of Cotton at Riverside Studios

31 October, 2011
by: DominicdiNezza

Theatre company Make&Bake bring Tenessee Williams and Horton Foote to Riverside Studios in a double bill that is at times shallow and at times gripping, says Dominic DiNezza. 

If the stylistic pairing of Tennessee Williams with Pulitzer and Oscar-winner Horton Foote (described as ‘America’s Chekhov') is an unusual one, the dramatic pairing of the evening's short pieces is less so.

The first – Foote’s Blind Date – sees the put-upon Sarah Nancy (Francesca Fenech) mercilessly prepped for an unwanted date by her aunt Dolores (Louise Templeton). When potential suitor and aspiring mortician Felix arrives, he proves to be everything Sarah Nancy could wish to avoid.
It’s a strange, hermetically-sealed piece – a critique of soulless middle-class matchmaking that itself seems oddly devoid of depth. Its construction is sound but the effect is purely functional. The cast (particularly Louise Templeton as the scheming aunt and Sebastian Knapp as the bible-toting Romeo) are game as they come, but the energy which director Suresh Patel tries to inject into the proceedings only emphasises the bloodlessness of the end result.

However, if it’s blood you want, it’s worth staying for Williams’ 27 Wagons Full of Cotton. Largely taking the form of a conversation between Vicarro, a cotton mogul who recently lost his prize engine in a mysterious accident, and Flora, the naïve young wife of a competitor, it serves to throw the emotional results of an unsuitable marriage (not unlike that presaged in Blind Date) many years into the future.

It’s indisputably more gripping: Knapp’s transformation into a wily sexual predator is probably the performance of the night, and Ross Ericson and Francesca Fenech are far more assured as the mismatched spouses trapped together by their own weaknesses. The classic Williams tension in the script is also more sustained, although towards the end it starts to meander, seemingly unsure of whether to end outright or provide a prologue to something bigger.

Ultimately, Patel’s intentions are clear and concise; both pieces underlining the absence of love without which a relationship can never grow. It’s ironic therefore that the texts he has twinned are themselves so innately flawed, neither perhaps demonstrating the best of their respective authors. 


The Make&Bake double bill runs at Riverside Studios until 13th November.


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