It was Sam Wanamaker who first introduced Tennessee Williams's play to England in 1958; and now his daughter, Zoe, gives a spectacularly fine performance in it. So fine, indeed, that it both honours the memory of the late Steven Pimlott, who started a production completed by Nicholas Hytner, and gives the illusion the play is better than it is.
Williams's heroine, Serafina, is a Sicilian dressmaker living in the Gulf Coast who, after the death of her truck-driver husband, goes into a prolonged three-year mourning: a reverie from which she is awoken, spiritually and sexually, by the arrival of a muscular buffoon.
But, while one applauds the play's affirmation of life and Williams's sly humour, the exposition is lazy, the rose-symbolism wildly excessive and the parallels between Serafina and her daughter, who finally conquers an improbably virginal sailor, over-contrived.
Never mind. Williams created a great character in Serafina that produces from Zoe Wanamaker the performance of her career. What she captures brilliantly are Serafina's contradictions. This is a warm-blooded woman who rejoices in the recollected animality of her, in fact, faithless husband. But Wanamaker also has the propriety of the Sicilian immigrant. She devoutly worships a Marian statue, rejects the lewd talk of loose women and, even when about to bed her late husband's comic replacement, ensures the secret is kept from her neighbours.
Wanamaker unforgettably gives us a woman in whom passion is always at war with Catholicism and observation of the social niceties.
After a sluggish start, the play takes off with the arrival of the substitute for the dead husband. And Darrell D'Silva is excellent as this amiable hulk filled with suppressed sexual longing: watching his hands trace the outline of Wanamaker's well-contoured body is a delight in itself and a reminder of Williams's own comic instinct.
Susannah Fielding also makes the most of Serafina's mewed-up daughter ardently in pursuit of the least-likely sailor in dramatic history. And Mark Thompson's clapboard set also conveys the cluttered nature of Serafina's workroom and provides ample space for the countless children, choric neighbours and even the goat that fill out the action.
At times, not least when the local witch comes on crying "The Wops are at it again", you feel Williams lays on the atmosphere with impasto thickness. But the play is worth seeing for Wanamaker whose Serafina is the embodiment of comic vitality.
· In rep until June 23. Box office: 020-7452 3000
