When you know someone solely by their monstrous reputation, meeting them in the flesh is usually a letdown. They seem so friendly, so credible, so human. That's because true baddies can't act like panto villains without being found out. They must dissemble.
Thus it is with Amanda Wingfield in Tennessee Williams's elegy to his own claustrophobic upbringing. As played by Ann Louise Ross, she is pleasant, even-tempered and attentive - not, on the surface, the kind of mother who would drive her son to drink and her daughter into a state of paralysing shyness.
When, for example, she discovers that the 23-year-old Laura has forsaken business college in preference to taking day-long walks in the park, her reaction is measured and pragmatic despite the rage and disappointment she feels. Ross shows us a believable character - perhaps a touch neurotic, a tad self-obsessed, but not an ogre. If anything, it is Richard Conlon's Tom, her son and the family's breadwinner, who appears petulant and indulgent, for all his rich-voiced charm.
All of which serves to bring out the ambivalent power of Williams's tragedy. However much the playwright would like to rail against the controlling tyranny of the mother, he never paints her as entirely malicious in intent.
Still, there is something rather too benign about this, Ken Alexander's final production as artistic director of the Byre. He has captured complex, rounded characters - and, with the help of Edward Lipscomb's set, a better-than-average sense of the family's prim austerity - but he has not fully squared up to the adolescent fury that gives the play its friction.
Such weak points pale, however, in the face of a heavenly courtship scene between Jim Webster's eager "gentleman caller" and Joanne Bett's painfully fragile Laura. It is perfectly paced and chillingly sad.
· Until November 22. Box office: 01334 475000.
