When a production of this 1958 Tennessee Williams play gets it right, as this one does, the play's poetic symbolism is almost unbearably claustrophobic. Unravelling what really happened to Sebastian Venable, a poet who died suddenly in mysterious circumstances last summer, this drama seethes with what cannot be said (cannibalism, homosexual desire, rape, incestuous love), and drips with allusions to a world beyond conventional morality.
Sebastian's mother Violet (played with just the right predatory, twisted grandeur by Ellen Sheean) recalls their relationship as "a world of light and shadow, but the shadow was almost as luminous as the light". This is what Philip Prowse's production taps into, with its monochrome hues - a white carpet, grotesque strings of pearls worn next to black lace chokers, an opening sequence bathed in ultraviolet light - and its emphasis on the subterranean.
Sebastian's tropical garden, with its Venus flytrap centrepiece, hovers above the stage, and the light fights to get through the leaves. In this setting, the twisted family values spill out in deeply affecting melodrama. Here is a mother who mourns her son like a lover; Catherine, whose mother calls her "sister" and who travelled with her cousin, Sebastian, procuring male lovers for him; and her brother George, who dresses like a dandy in his dead cousin's clothes.
Central to the success of this production are Sheean's performance as the bereft, menacing mother, and Patti Clare's tender portrayal of Catherine, a young woman damaged by what she has seen and locked up in asylums to keep her quiet. The horror contained in her long, sad monologue, spoken under hypnosis in staccato bursts and girlish, gaspy sing-song, will take her, like Williams's sister, to the operating table for a lobotomy. All through the play she rails against this. By the end, once her tale has been told, she walks towards it as if it's some kind of relief.
Until December 22. Box office: 0141-429 0022.
