Faded Southern belle Amanda Wingfield has tended to come across as a ghastly old bat in plenty of past productions of Tennessee Williams' landmark American drama.
But Brenda Blethyn brings her powerfully alive in this engaging new staging as a disappointed but essentially endearing woman deeply concerned for her children.
Yes, she's overbearing and interfering; and she's blind to many of the frustrations sh
e causes; but Blethyn's sensitive portrayal leaves her audience in absolutely no doubt: Wingfield's heart is exactly where it ought to be.
Blethyn is superb in the role, torn between evocations of past happinesses and deeply-felt - but probably unfounded - worries for her children's future.
Most of those concerns centre on the need to conjure from somewhere a "gentleman caller" for her terribly sweet, but slightly batty daughter Laura (Emma Hamilton), a girl who's allowed her exaggerated perception of her handicap to dominate everything.
Hamilton gives a touching performance, matched by that of would-be writer son Tom (Mark Arends), frustrated beyond endurance by his mother's suffocating attentions. Andrew Langtree completes the cast as the gentleman caller.
Little happens for two and a half hours, but it's impossible not to get sucked into all the tensions of this Depression hothouse - tensions which are beautifully and occasionally explosively teased out by a first-rate cast.
Phil Hewitt
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