Lia Williams gives a brilliant performance as Alma Winemiller, a repressed and flighty rector's daughter, in Dominic Cooke's production of this little-known Tennessee Williams play - a 1970s rewriting of his better-known Summer and Smoke. But Risteard Cooper is unable to make sense of the arguably underwritten role of Alma's love interest, John Buchanan, and is hindered considerably by the fact that he is too old for the part.
The playwright said that, of all his characters, Alma was the one he most identified with: a dreamer-misfit, a poetic spirit crushed by societal convention and an inability to act on her desires. In Williams's performance it is clear that she has always loved her neighbour John, the town doctor's son training to be a doctor himself. When she is around him her overactive hands fly into the air and her voice, as another character wickedly observes, goes up a few octaves. Alma's main outlet is singing (she is the nightingale of the title) and in Williams's compassionate performance we see how much Alma believes in the power of art to bring life meaning.
John is compelled by Alma's world view, and increasingly drawn towards her. But his social position - represented by his smothering mother (Barbara Brennan) - means that he cannot consider Alma a potential wife. John lives his life looking in microscopes, philosophising about the brevity of lifespans in petri dishes; Alma is constantly on the edge, nearly incapacitated by the expansiveness of her imaginative life. It is a wonderful, tragic love match that is gripping to watch.
But the fact that Cooper's John is not a tortured young intellectual, but a solidly built man in his late 30s still being bossed around by his mother, adds a layer of perversity that distracts from the play's central action. John has very little to say for himself until the second act, and Cooper does not manage to give a sense of the character's inner life. We never understand what he is staring into the distance about.
Set shifts executed by seemingly somnambulant costumed actors create a sense of the tortured sluggishness of life in the ironically-named Glorious Hill, Mississippi, and create a frame for Williams's miraculous, fragile liveliness. No one on stage, however, can match her. The play and the star deserve better.
· Until April 26. Box office: 00 353 1 874 4045.
