Comedy and tragedy, love and bitterness, sex and abstinence, red and white, a rose and the ashes of a husband: Tennessee Williams' comedy  The Rose Tattoo is filled with opposites, symbols and metaphors. The Pembroke Players present a great adaption that masters the fine lines between humour and ridiculousness, romance and sob stuff to give a great laugh as well as a beautiful love story.

Serafina Delle Rose (Sarah Livingstone), an Italian-American woman somewhere in Louisiana in the 1950s, loses her deeply loved husband and falls into utter bitterness and mourning.  Hurt and lonely in the desperate memory of her lost love, she isolates herself and her only daughter Rosa  (Lanikai Krishnadasan Torrens) from a world outside full of sins, seduction and promiscuity. Only with revelations of her husband's past and the appearance of a new man in her life is Serafina able to move on and open her heart for others again.

Livingstone, as the centre of the play, is once again outstanding. She gives an excellent impression as a proud, voluptuous Sicilian woman, wanting nothing more than to love, but finding herself deeply hurt. Her appearance, her gestures and even her accent are all incredibly authentic and it is just a pleasure to watch her character develop and change from a full-burst red to a pale and isolated white and back again. Whatever dress and color she's wearing, Livingstone is convincing and truly the centre of the action. The two Italian girls (Alexandra Grigore, Nisha Emich) gossiping from backstage together with the Sicilian music and dancing add even more authenticity to the play.

The opening dialogue between Serafina and Assunta (Helen Charman) sets the scene well, but the play, unfortunately, gets too hectic for a while afterwards. The exposition (Serafina as the loving wife) is oddly cut short without fully settling in. The death of her husband and her emotional reactions seem unnecessarily rushed and somewhat unsatisfying. The timing gets worse, when Serafina goes on a long-winded monologue in the second act about her lost love.

However, the play quickly resettles and reaches its heights with the appearance of Alvaro Mangiacavallo (Jamie Hansen). His connection with Livingstone is just brilliant as they come together for an awkwardly comical but heart-warming love story. It is the subtly nuanced acting of both Hansen and Livingstone that make this play work so remarkably well: whilst their mutual advances are sometimes clownish, they manage to avoid drifting into superficial flatness and keep the play on the fine line that it was originally put on by Williams.

Overall, this strong cast of Pembroke Players give a funny and entertaining, while heart-warming and touching performance, that at the same time gives a great laugh and a beautiful romance reflecting love in all its aspects.