Suddenly Last Summer

Suddenly Last Summer description

Suddenly Last Summer sets two irreconcilable accounts of a young man's death against each other, and makes a doctor choose between them.

New Orleans, 1936. Violet Venable is determined to protect the reputation of her late son Sebastian, who died the previous summer while travelling abroad. Her niece Catharine Holly was with him and remembers it differently. Violet has the means to have Catharine's memory silenced, and it falls to a young doctor to decide whose version of events he believes.

Tennessee Williams wrote the play as a one-act, first staged in 1958 on a double bill with Something Unspoken. It was filmed the following year from a screenplay by Gore Vidal, with Elizabeth Taylor, Katharine Hepburn and Montgomery Clift, but it is performed on stage far less often than A Streetcar Named Desire or The Glass Menagerie, which makes a major London revival unusual.

The play is by Tennessee Williams and the director is Michael Grandage, returning to the National Theatre after more than fifteen years. Grandage ran the Donmar Warehouse for a decade and has won Olivier Awards and a Tony Award for Red.

Emma Corrin, a Golden Globe winner for The Crown and seen on stage in Orlando and Anna X, appears alongside Harriet Walter, an Olivier Award winner whose recent work includes The House of Bernarda Alba at the National Theatre and Succession on screen.

Book tickets to watch a doctor weigh one family's truth against another in the Olivier Theatre.

Playing at Olivier - National Theatre

South Bank, London, SE1 9PX GB (venue info)

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