Photo: Tristram Kenton
Theatre is a place of alchemy where base metal can often be turned into gold. You could hardly have better proof than Michael Grandage's production of this 1958 Tennessee Williams play which for 90 minutes convinces you that you are watching a poetically intense drama rather than a grotesque anecdote.
Something momentous is implied the instant the circular steel doors of Christopher Oram's design part to reveal a tropical New Orleans garden. This steamy hothouse was the property of a dead poet, Sebastian, whose life was a work of art. That at least is the view of his mother, Mrs Venable, who is so anxious to preserve his idealised memory that she is prepared to have his cousin, Catherine, lobotomised. But Catherine has her own story to tell about accompanying the gay Sebastian on a Spanish cruising expedition that ended with the poet being cannibalised rather than lionised.
As a play, I feel it tells you more about the state of Tennessee than the state of mankind. Williams himself was clearly haunted by the way his sister, Rose, was institutionalised and by the consequences of his own sexual foraging. But, while the play was therapeutically vital for Williams, I jib at his conclusion that "we all use each other" in the name of love. And while this play deals, like all his work, with the conflict between the poetic soul and materialism, I feel Williams sanctifies the dead Sebastian. Instead of demonstrating the point as he does in Streetcar, he simply takes it as a given that all aesthetes are tragically martyred figures.
But my objections are overcome by the voluptuous theatricality of Grandage's production. Aided by Adam Cork's superb sound track, he underscores the action with savage bird-cries and distantly reverberative music. Within that operatic framework, Grandage encourages the actors to play with total realism. Diana Rigg's excellent Mrs Venable is a silver-haired solitary cocooned in a romantic dream about her son. When she cries that "we carved out each day of our lives like a piece of sculpture" you realise she has succumbed to the fallacy that a life can be as perfectly shaped as a work of art.
Victoria Hamilton is even more startling as Catherine. With her dark, deep-set eyes and initially rigid posture, she suggests a woman haunted by memory. The way she mauls Mark Bazeley's sympathetic doctor suggests she is a victim of the solitude that afflicts all Williams's characters. Such is the production's transfixing power that when the doors of Oram's set finally close you feel you have witnessed a poetic evocation of human loneliness.
· Until February 27. Box office: 0114-249 6000.
