The storm-waters are rising around the farmstead somewhere in rural Mississippi when Lot, coughing ominously, comes back to the family home with his new bride; everyone has fled except his half-brother Chicken, who sits morosely in the kitchen downing liquor from an earthenware jug when he is not carving indecent figures on the wooden table or entertaining his new sister-in-law by hurling a startled cat into the flooded cellar….

[Kingdom of Earth] reminds one occasionally of Pinter, but more frequently of Victorian melodrama, hinging as it does upon that old standby, a disputed inheritance….

[The] Southern air is heavy with symbolism, too: the farmstead … stands for the corrosive influence of long-dead parents…. Chicken, loutish and sensual, relishes only the physical pleasures of life and never penetrates far beyond the culinary regions of the house…. Lot, pouring sherry wine from a cut-glass decanter in the tarnished opulence of his mother's parlour, embodies a feminine search for some kind of other-worldly refinement: in Tennessee Williams's over-heated world even his sickness is a gesture of defiance in the face of Chicken's rude health.

Kingdom of Earth is sub-titled 'The Seven Descents of Myrtle', but it might well have been called 'Southern Comfort Farm'. Williams himself, apparently, has called it 'my comic melodrama', and indeed it is difficult to know how seriously the author wants us to take this play. The brooding atmosphere, the sudden eruptions of violence, the hostility to brute masculinity, are familiar from his other plays, but here they tip over into the sort of luxuriant excess that makes one suspect the author has his tongue in his cheek: as an exercise in Mississippi Gothic there can't be much to beat Lot's macabre end: having plundered his mother's wardrobe, preserved in the marital bedroom he struggles into the whitest of her gowns and, pale and gasping, expires before his incredulous wife. (p. 39)