Tennessee Williams’ play The Rose Tattoo is an apt choice of play to stage, particularly in a Maltese context. Its cast of characters, of Italian American origin, will find immediate empathy with an audience that is attuned to its Mediterranean undertones. This was one of the reasons why the Malta Drama Centre in collaboration with the Manoel Theatre and the American Embassy chose this play to celebrate the centenary of William’s birth and the sixtieth anniversary of its premiere on Broadway.
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’d 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.
Serafina’s double loss, that of the man she loves and her happy memories of him are expressed through her increasingly strange behavior.
This puts her at the mercy of the machinations of the town’s gossips led by a woman known as La Strega (The Witch) who suffers from rheumatism in her hands and cataracts, and who keeps a goat that has a habit of wandering where it’s least wanted. In a highly dramatic sequence after Serafina has learnt of her husband’s fatal road accident, Estelle enters shrouded in black carrying a bouquet of roses, which the mourners snatch from her and tear apart.
Three years go by and Serafina resolutely forbids her daughter from attending her high school graduation after she found out that she is attracted to a boy in her class, Jack. Serafina’s disheveled appearance stirs the local priest to talk to Serafina about her prolonged grief and her protracted attachment to her husband’s cremated ashes. Serafina’s psychological breakthrough occurs when Alvaro, a driver on the brink of losing his job, confronts a salesman who wants to sell Serafina a dodgy contraption. After many tragicomic detours, Serafina lets go of the memory of her dead husband and opens up to life once more.
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…” And it truly is. 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 British Sunday Times theatre critic, observed that Williams’ plays overflowed with the deepest of human emotions, the search for ways to express sexuality and melancholy in a repressive and staid context, which in turn leads to a less repressive 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 similarites are still there – Serafina is also a wounded William’s woman, she just has more spunk than the rest.
The Rose Tattoo will be performed at the Manoel Theatre on May 20, 21, 22 with Jane Marshall, Sharon Bezzina, Marvic Cordina, Mary Rose Mallia and John Grech in the leading roles. The play is directed by Albert Marshall.
Booking on 21246389 or bookings@teatrumanoel.com.mt. Online bookings:
www.teatrumanoel.com.mt
