Summer and Smoke

Playwright: Tennessee Williams Director: Rebecca Frecknall

Almeida Theatre, Almeida Street, London N1 (020-7359 4404) Until 7 April Running time: 2hrs 40mins (including interval)

On its premiere in 1948, Summer and Smoke got a sniffy response from US critics who found it “juvenile, mawkish and monotonous”, said Dominic Cavendish in The Daily Telegraph. The play – about an uptight Mississippi minister’s daughter, Alma, who pines for a rugged neighbouring doctor, her childhood crush – was seen as a disappointing step down from A Streetcar Named Desire, and has only rarely been revived. Tennessee Williams hated that original production, but he regarded the play itself as up there with his best, and every moment of Rebecca Frecknall’s revival vindicates that judgement. This beautiful, riveting, thrillingly acted expressionistic take on Summer and Smoke “raises its status at a stroke”. “Rush to see this now, or live to regret it.”

To begin with, I feared Frecknall’s production was going to be “fashionably tricksy”, said Michael Billington in The Guardian. She and designer Tom Scutt eschew realism for a circular pit of sandy earth ringed by nine upright pianos, inner workings visible, which are used to create an unnervingly discordant atmosphere. But in no time this show had me “totally in its grip” – and it immediately restores this “wrongly neglected play to a central place in the canon”. It also confirms the status of Patsy Ferran as a major star of the British stage, said Holly Williams in The Independent. This astonishingly gifted and versatile young actress could probably “read a bad undergraduate essay on Williams and it’d sound like the most poignant thing you’ve ever heard”. Here, as Alma, she is a “genuine marvel, as hilarious as she is heartbreaking”.

This production is a “revelation”, and takes Ferran to a new level, agreed Susannah Clapp in The Observer. But “there is more than one marvel” here; Nancy Crane is brilliant as a dippy mother and Matthew Needham is first-rate as the “hot doc”, twisting between rawness and confidence. It seems that just occasionally it can “take 70 years for a play to find the right director, the right production, and so find itself”, said Tim Bano in The Stage. “It’s worth the wait.”