Bad productions of Tennessee Williams plays tend to spill into melodrama. Good productions make you feel the tragedy of people who lie not just to each other, but to themselves. Williams's characters are the golden ones who have been tarnished, and none more so than Brick and Maggie, the alcoholic ex-football player and his beautiful, desperate, childless wife whom he refuses to bed.
This uneven touring production is neither particularly good nor particularly bad, but a Williams play that isn't unbearably painful to watch isn't one that is doing him justice. The deep-south plantation house is nicely evoked by Kit Surrey's design of louvre doors that also manages to suggest something of the cage that Brick and Maggie have made within their marriage. It is cleverly lit by John Bramley so that you feel the suffocating heat, the swish of the fan and the whoosh of the fireworks that celebrate Big Daddy's birthday.
For all this, the acting too often suggests that we are in a very tasteful fitted bedroom somewhere in the home counties. Darren Strange's watchful Brick is rather good, a man who looks as if he is corroding from the inside out and has the "charm of the defeated". As Maggie, Helena Lyons looks right, but doesn't always sound right; although she apparently displays all the emotion that the role demands, she never makes you feel it. It is all show and no depth. Elsewhere, many of the actors mistake shouting for feeling, so much so that you wonder why, with 28 acres at his disposal, Big Daddy doesn't build a bigger house with the bedrooms further apart.
· Ends tonight. Box office: 01635 522733. Then touring.
