Sweet Bird Of Youth (1959) is not among the more restrained of Tennessee Williams’ full-length plays. Now go back and re-read that sentence to grasp its full import. Southern politics, real and desired film stardom, hysterectomy, castration and of course the Williams staple of loveless, ill-matched sex are the ingredients here, along with a doomed couple named Chance and Heavenly. Little wonder that Anthony Ward’s set design for this revival is topped off with a huge billowing white shape, hovering over the proceedings like a rumpled bed-sheet crossed with a portentous albatross.

Mucho melodrama, then, even by Williams’ standards. What is impressive is how well director Jonathan Kent and female lead Marcia Gay Harden damp this down. As fading screen idol Alexandra del Lago, Harden (herself an Oscar winner) cannot altogether avoid moments of divadom – the script requires a clutch of them – but at almost all other times her character, fleeing from the presumed bad reviews for her comeback picture, displays a grim fatalism. She can flee those reviews, but she knows she can’t escape them.

This gives the character depth, but it also attenuates the connection with Chance, the fading gigolo who has lured her back to his home town so that he can reunite with his beloved of old and exploit Alexandra’s status to break big. As Chance, Brian J Smith (one of the stars of the Wachowskis’ TV series sense8) has no alternative but to give full rein to all those Tennessee-ese set-pieces about his history, his dreams and fears. There are quite a few of these last, as 29-year-old Chance is the surrogate of the then-38-year-old Williams in his terror of ageing and losing the vigour and dynamism of youth.

The cast also includes Richard Cordery, who is as commanding in the role of Heavenly’s father Boss Finley as is possible short of actually being Burl Ives, and Emma Amos as the Boss’s mistress, pursuing her own stratagems against passing her sell-by date. But the crucial tension between Chance and Alexandra, a tension of both sex and power, is antithetical to Kent’s approach here as director. I think his choice is the right one, but nevertheless it’s a circle that can’t be squared.

Written for the Financial Times.