Evening Standard from London, Greater London, England • 7

EVENING STANDARD THURSDAY 15 APRIL 1999 7 Lurid vision of wickedness i i forms a theatrical sensation FIRST-NIGHT by Nicholas de Jongh Suddenly Last Summer Comedy Theatre IT MUST BE the most disturbing stage-set on which I have ever set eyes And what shudders of pleasant anticipation were induced Your mind was prepared far lashings of nastiness Designer Tim Hatley had set Suddenly Last Summer to near perfection creating a New Orleans garden-veranda as a nightmare jungle It was crammed with treesized thistles plants and daw-like weeds all in petrified appearance and the colour of unfresh mushrooms And were not those three giant oval-shaped scro-turns growing amidst the weeds while a tottering Sheila Gish dressed to kill in livid mauve arrived Perhaps so For this was the heart of Tennessee Williams country where sex always rears an anxious or guilty head Suddenly Last Summer never seen before upon a major West End stage is darkest play of all and Sean production brings it to awful life Williams does offer a host of dangers and temptations for directors and audiences alike as he teeters on the verges of gothic melodrama Forty years ago when stage censorship in England still existed they were far more worried about the Mrs Venable tries to bribe handsome Dr Cukrowicz (uncomfortable Gerard Butler) to lobotomise her niece Catharine Notes of black comedy are distinctly heard though Patricia lipsticked red-nailed nursing nun in full rig is preposterous Mrs only concern is to ensure that the truth about gay Sebastian the dead son she incestuously adored will never be revealed by Catharine (Rachel Weisz) Homosexuality is the sin that dare not give its details The voluptuous Miss Weisz does not quite rise to the horror of confessional but what a searing super performance she gives: mercu-rially flashing between laughter and sobs clinging to her mother and die doctor as if they were life-buoys she has the air of scared damaged child Miss Gish is even better except when lazy ear allows her to perform at a dash Her stricken Violet may be a withering flower but my how she withers with icy glances stiffly bends towards Catharine like a cat poised to scratch eyes out Her rages and collapses are like the slitherings of a very risky snake A true theatrical sensation Ratings: adequate it good very good outstanding poor Mora reviews: Page 51 last night Mathias steers the play away from a tumble into Grand gulch So Suddenly Last Summer keeps a haunting conviction about it particularly when Miss Gish as the monstrous stroke-ridden Violet Venable is on hand in her wheelchair to spread more than a little malice Williams wrote the play when in despair and the grip of a Freudian psychoanalyst who urged him to give up gay life and try a little heterosexuality So Williams laid his family ghosts in revenge with a play about a search for truth and love revealed as a system of use and abuse Never again would Williams conjure up an America and its family life so poetically fraught with greed hatred and unnaturalness The excitement of the evening derives from the lurid strength of his vision of wickedness and inverted morality Out in the blanched garden with its wild bird sounds cicadas summer thunder and dripping water those days was not nearly ing as buggery But there was no laughter of the wrong mocking sort Julia Swift and Rachel Weisz in Suddenly Last Summer Thai search for Garnet Point POLICE were today trying to contact the sister of a 17-year-old schoolgirl who was found strangled and dumped in an alley The naked body of Ashley Robinson a star brother waited at home in Axbridge Somer-pupil at Millfield public school was discov- set Surrey police were trying to trace her sis-eral after a night out with friends in Guild- ter who is on holiday in Thailand ford While her devastated parents and Her father Terence travelled to Guildford to identify body Her brother Paul said: is a very difficult time and we are all very A spokesman for Thai police who are helping in the search for her sister said celebrations for the Buddhist New Year and bad weather would hamper inquiries of the hundreds of thousands of British holidaymakers who flock to Thailand spend very little time in Bangkok before he said search is made worse because of the unusually bad weather for the time of year which has stranded thousands of Ashley had been visiting friends in Cobham on Monday During the evening she was with a group of girls who visited several bars in Guildford town centre before ending up at a nightclub She became separated from the group and was last seen talking to a man outside the club The incident was captured on a closed-circuit television camera friends reported her missing in the early hours of Tuesday Her body was found a quarter of a mile away from the nightclub at 8am that day Peter Johnson headmaster of the £15000-a-year Millfield School where Ashley was studying physics chemistry and maths at A-level said: whole of the Millfield community was devastated to learn of the terrible news She was a popular day girl in her final year who was an excellent student predicted to get straight As in her science A-levels was a hard-working student with university offers from Durham Edinburgh the LSE and Nottingham to read psychology She was a fine Ashley Robinson: killed on night out fencer reaching national standard at the foil and was in the Millfield show choir Her brother and sister are former pupils and so the Robinsons have had a long association with Norman Golding fencing coach said she was an sports talent who had reached the national under-16s finals two years ago and had fenced for her school and the South-West region was a very talented athlete and it was always a pleasure to have her in the team Everyone wanted her to be part of their group She was a real team he said Detective Superintendent John Beavis who is leading the murder investigation described Ashley as a full-of-fun girl with a wicked sense of He said: family are devastated One of the most difficult jobs I have had to do in the police service was to speak to Mr Police do not know whether Ashley was raped before she died Today detectives were applying to magistrates for permission to continue to question a 29-year-old single unemployed man from Guildford who was arrested on Tuesday evening in connection with the murder y'' Yv': yJ 'A' mw r-'- Jv- rjfT-'-' i'i' Ike Now Wort) a Aow )a re -f ulIbo)re) re).