Photograph: Tristram Kenton
This Tennessee Williams play certainly hasn't suffered from over-exposure. Unseen in London since 1962, it is generally regarded as an aberrant deviation into comedy. But, in Howard Davies' attentive and loving production, it emerges as an intriguing play that touches on many of Williams' major themes: loneliness, fear, impotence, and the need for consoling human warmth.
Admittedly the play starts on a deceptively light note. Newly married George and Isabel turn up one Christmas Eve at the Nashville home of George's old wartime buddy, Ralph. But everything is clearly not as it should be. George has the shakes and his honeymoon night has been an unconsummated disaster. Ralph, who has just quit his job, has been abandoned by his wife. And, as if this were not enough, his suburban home is built over a cavern into which it is slowly subsiding.
A lot of the play is very funny, which comes as no great surprise to those of us who regard Williams as a Southern humorist and who recall his endless chuckles at his own supposedly harrowing plays. But here the laughs are built in to the text, as when Isabel tells Ralph "I'm afraid I married a stranger" only to be wryly told: "Everybody does that."
There are also good situational gags, such as when the innocently sexy Isabel snuggles up to Ralph and asks: "What do you do with a bride left on your doorstep, Mr Bates?"
But, although there are jokes which Neil Simon would not disown, Williams hints at darker themes. Davies' production leaves little doubt that the real bond is between the impotent George and the dissatisfied Ralph, who dream of setting up a ranch together in Texas; and Williams' point is that the American virility cult conceals a pervasive homosexual urge.
Even the overstated theme of the slowly subsiding house suggests that the bland conformity of Eisenhower's America - the play was written in the late 1950s - was erected on the shakiest foundations. Davies brings all this out without destroying Williams's comic fabric.
Lisa Dillon is outstanding in the way she contrasts Isabel's sexiness and puritanism; her voice takes on a withering Texan scorn as she speaks of women in army camps in "occupied territories". Benedict Cumberbatch's nervously sweating George reveals the timidity beneath the sexual bombast. And Jared Harris' rueful, disillusioned Ralph is hilariously partnered by Sandy McDade who makes his suddenly returning wife a onetime victim of psychological frigidity who can't wait to get into the bedroom.
This may not, in the last analysis, be major Williams; but, as this high-class revival shows, it echoes all the themes that reverberate through his more celebrated work.
· Until April 29. Box office: 020-7359 4404.
