Three new figures take to the stage in Sarah Frankcom’s Tennessee Williams revival. Dressed in Day of the Dead fashion – in contrast to the modern costuming of the “real” characters – they simply witness Blanche DuBois’ gradual disintegration: the further she cracks, the more they appear. At the end, the same actors double as the doctor and nurses who take the now irreparably fractured Blanche away. Have the previous three and a quarter hours, then, been Blanche in a fugue state in the mental institution, inwardly reliving the events whereby she came to be there? Could be.

Blanche is played by Maxine Peake, who has turned in memorable performances here for Frankcom as Hamlet a couple of years ago and as Caryl Churchill’s eponymous Skriker last summer. Her Blanche is similarly intense and carefully thought out. In many readings Blanche, having arrived in New Orleans to share a cramped apartment with sister Stella and her bullish husband Stanley Kowalski, seems to be living in a world of her own. Despite the interpretation I mentioned above, Peake’s Blanche is more about trying to force everyone else into line with her vision... in which, of course, she fails. Her attempts at flirtation and seduction are unsubtle and tang of desperation; it’s a wonder Youssef Kerkour as Mitch takes so long to see through her stratagems. Ben Batt’s Stanley is even more unpolished, his deceptively deliberate words laying bare the truth about Blanche at odds with his rumbling manner. Sharon Duncan-Brewster is a top-notch Stella, torn by conflicting loves for her husband and her sister. (Does it matter that Blanche DuBois – “it means ‘white woods’” – has a black sister?  Maybe for about two seconds.)

For some reason, however, matters don’t jell as they should. Fly Davis provides a squalid set: a couple of mattresses on the floor, a mini-fridge and a green baize “carpet” on which Stanley’s poker school plays. The floor is periodically cleaned up, including for two or three full minutes directly after Stanley’s (underdone) rape of Blanche, offering not so much a contrast as an ill-advised deflation. Frankcom’s production sets out, I think, to mirror Blanche’s contradictions and lack of control, but in the end – also like her – it’s a bit flaky.

Written for the Financial Times.