A hot and sultry late summer night presents the perfect conditions for one of the hottest, sultriest plays ever written. It's one of those evenings where perspiration refuses to evaporate. A ceiling fan churns the stagnant air. And that's before the play has even started.
There's additional poignancy to staging Tennessee Williams' classic right now, as it distils the raw spirit of a mythical Dixieland, which may have vanished forever in last week's hurricane. Yet there's nothing remotely romanticised about Richard Baron's production, which returns to Williams' original version of the script, stripping away the accretions introduced later on Broadway and in Hollywood.
Williams' conception is a work of acute, Southern discomfort: "the fiercely charged interplay of live human beings in the thundercloud of a common crisis". At the heart of the storm is the overbearing, mendacious Big Daddy, patriarch of the richest plantation on the Delta, now riddled with cancer, but determined to cheat death the same way he has cheated all his other enemies over the years.
Aaron Shirley excels as this bellowing ox of a man who refuses to go gently into the night. According to Williams's original intention, he is here denied any form of rapprochement with his lame, alcoholic son Brick. Nor does Dugald Bruce-Lockhart's inviolably taciturn performance shy away from suggesting that latent homosexuality is at the heart of Brick's incapacitating lassitude.
Christine Absalom hints touchingly at the emotional wounds beneath Big Mama's garrulous vulgarity. And there's a keen display of subtly disguised avarice from Lesley Harcourt's Maggie, a sly southern belle who moves like a cat and prattles like a paddle steamer. "Do you think the mosquitoes will be biting tonight?" she drawls coquettishly. Stepping out into the humid Nottingham air, the answer appears to be yes.
· Until September 25. Box office: 0115-941 9419.
