Although written in 1948, Tennessee Williams’ play did not receive its London première until 2006, and closed then after less than half its scheduled run. Rebecca Frecknall’s revival is unlikely to suffer the same fate, radiant as it is with five-star reviews from its spring stint at the Almeida and illuminated by a glorious central performance from Patsy Ferran.

This could be the break that turns Ferran from an actor admired by the cognoscenti to one fêted by anyone who knows anything at all. As Alma Winemiller, the repressed music teacher daughter of a Mississippi pastor, she is as physically articulate as she is vocally, alive at every instant with gestures and expressions laying bare the core of her character. It’s a Rowan Atkinsonesque mobility, but turned to weightier dramatic use, looking almost as if Ferran’s physical frame is too fragile to contain all these thoughts and feelings for any length of time.

This makes her perfect casting as Alma, who struggles first with the libertinage and lack of spirituality of the boy next door, young doctor John Buchanan, then with her recognition of the life of this world even as John moves in the opposite direction. Matthew Needham’s John is very much a Williams archetype, at times almost Dr Stanley Kowalski, until he experiences his own epiphany. Forbes Masson doubles as both their fathers, Nancy Crane as Alma’s mother and the local gossip, and Anjana Vasan as pretty much every young woman in Glorious Hill, Miss.

Frecknall, too, makes an impact in her first major London production, opting for a powerful expressionist staging. The circular playing area seen in the Almeida has now been halved by designer Tom Scutt to cater to this more end-on, proscenium space; bare save for an occasional wooden chair or two, it feels like an arena for the events of... well, since Alma so emphasises the Spanish meaning of her name, the events of her soul. This area is fringed by seven upright pianos, stripped so that Angus MacRae’s atmospheric score can be played by every actor except Ferran not just with keys but by plucking, strumming and even bowing the instruments’ strings.

Summer And Smoke is a comparatively early Williams play (he later revised it as The Eccentricities Of A Nightingale), and contains much scarcely- or unmediated biography. Music teaching, living in a parsonage, the mentally ill relative, even the travelling shoe salesman in the final scene, are all echoes of the writer’s family. John Buchanan is the kind of boozy roué (albeit a heterosexual one) that often seems to be an exaggerated self-indictment by Williams, with in this case a redemption that he perhaps wished for himself. It’s not a subtle piece even by Tennessee standards, and the central couple’s attitudinal swap is pretty perfunctory. Yet Frecknall’s staging strips it of almost all the overwrought symbolism and leaves us with individuals and their innermost workings. Ferran, in turn, brings that innermost out into the open with heartbreaking clarity.

Written for the Financial Times.