The trouble with the theatre is that there aren’t many good playwrights. Few great writers have written for the stage, and only at fleeting moments in the past — Athens around 450 BC and London circa 1600 — have the best writers taken it for granted that the stage was the thing to write for. That may be why stage folk find it hard to tell the difference. Directors slash and tweak and travesty the text, and actors run around like small cornered mammals, shrieking and making faces, driven by the fear that the stuff they are doing isn’t really any good. Hamlet’s advice to the players — keep it light, keep it natural — has been as mulishly ignored throughout history as Polonius’s advice to young persons. Pity that Hamlet never gave any advice to producers and directors too. But Tennessee Williams did. And here it is.
I should guess that three-quarters of this second volume of his letters are addressed to his agent Audrey Wood, his favourite director Elia Kazan and other directors and producers who were entrusted with his greatest plays, which all date from this period.
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