Catharine begins to tell the audience what they have been waiting to hear since the curtains opened: ‘This you won’t believe, nobody has believed it, nobody could believe it, nobody; nobody on earth could possibly believe it, and I don’t blame them!’ The old lady with her ‘cries out softly’, then ‘springs with amazing power from her wheelchair, stumbles erratically but swiftly toward the girl and tries to strike her with her cane.’ As she is dragged off stage she yells her final words, ‘Cut this hideous story out of her brain!’ (Williams 2009, p. 51).
These are the final moments of Suddenly Last Summer (1958), written by Tennessee Williams around the middle of his career, between two far better-known works: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955) and Sweet Bird of Youth (1959). Although it is rarely produced nowadays, Williams always regarded Suddenly Last Summer with affection. He referred to the play as a poem, and like a poem this one-act drama is vivid, compressed and richly symbolic, with lyricism capable of inspiring great performances from actresses such as Elizabeth Taylor, Katharine Hepburn and Maggie Smith.
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