****

Tennessee Williams's first great full-length play was the most fragile of monsters, setting the template for his sadder, angrier stabs at the heart of familial dysfunction that followed its 1944 premiere. The howls of frustration that pour from Williams's semi-autobiographical litany of heartbreak and hubris are also peppered with a guilt that threatens to fall apart any second, as runaway boy poet Tom sheds light on the two rooms where his mother, Amanda, lives through her former glories while his sister, Laura, creates a far more insular world of her own.

Jemima Levick's production pares things back to near chamber-play form in a quasi-expressionist display of parlour-room intimacy. Much of the jaded, faded effect is created by the way that Jessica Brettle's interior design is lit by Chris Davey, and how Phillip Pinsky's gossamer-like score trickles between the cracks to accentuate each mannerism of a family caught in a limbo between truth and illusion. Barbara Marten's brittle Amanda even gives herself the luxury of a curtain to open and close on each domestic activity.

The climax develops almost too quietly, with traditionally bombastic lines underplayed and turned in on themselves, in what is eventually revealed as a slow-burning everyday tragedy that Levick allows us to witness close-up. Marten and Nicola Harrison's wide-eyed twitchiness as Laura are offset by Joseph Arkley's Tom and the unabashed ebullience of Antony Eden's Gentleman Caller. His and Laura's brief flash of shared hope is one of the greatest depictions of disappointment ever written. For Laura, under the circumstances, it's all she ever expected. For her make-believe, would-be beau, his thwarted faith is destined to be a far greater failure.