The Night Of The Iguana

This show has now closed, click here for a listing of current and future London shows

Play Opened 5 December 2005, Closed 25 March 2006

Lyric Theatre Shaftesbury Avenue, London

Tennessee Williams's The Night Of The Iguana takes place on a veranda overlooking a dark beach at a broken-down Mexican hotel during 1940 and it is from here that the defrocked Reverend Dr T Lawrence Shannon guides tourists around to make end meet. The play explores the interactions between the Reverend, Maxime, the widow who owns the hotel, Hannah, a spinster and Charlotte, a brattish teenager.

This production which is directed by Anthony Page stars Woody Harrelson, Clare Higgins and Jenny Seagrove.

When The Night Of The Iguana was first staged on Broadway in December 1961 it won the Tony Award for 'Best Play'. It was then made into a film which starred Richard Burton, Ava Gardner, Deborah Kerr and Sue Lyon.

"This is the West End at its best: a production ruthlessly unsentimental and poetic in its tone and its values. Tennessee Williams's play does wobble a little, but Anthony Page's magisterial direction takes care of that... Woody Harrelson's failed priest is magnificently and hilariously angry, with no self-pity to sweeten the imagination... Jenny Seagrove gives the most commanding performance of her career." The Sunday Times

"Anthony Page's accomplished, largely persuasive revival" The Independent

"Maybe this staging would have benefited from a little more cash being lavished on Anthony Ward's set... Nonetheless, the central performances are compelling, particularly Clare Higgins who deserves a medal for all her recent superb performances. Her blousy (and fleetingly blouseless) Maxine is terrifically natural... Woody Harrelson could be more dangerous and sexually taunting with Jenny Seagrove... However, he is intensely jittery - never at rest - with a jutting jaw that makes him sound slightly slurry and backward." The Independent on Sunday

"Director Anthony Page has created an intelligent new version of Iguana of the Night" The London Evening Standard

"Tennessee Williams's 1961 play pictures a group of characters unravelling and perhaps saving each other in a down-at-heel Mexican hotel... Anthony Ward's design traps it in package-holiday brightness: pop-up palm trees and beach-ball colours. Woody Harrelson, far too well-toned for a gone-to-seed defrocked priest, juts his jaw at the beginning and keeps it jutting. Jenny Seagrove is too pretty and too passive for a scamming spinster. Nearly everyone else is wheeled on to do a comic number." The Observer