In his memoirs, Tennessee Williams cited this 1955 play as his favourite, the one that came “closest to being a work of art and a work of craft” in its vision of greed, lust and envy in the American South.

It begins with Brick - the favourite son of Big Daddy, a plantation owner in the Mississippi Delta - drinking himself silly rather than facing the demands of his childless wife, Maggie, who finds living with an alcoholic precarious and painful.

In act two, Brick’s ambivalent sexuality is exposed, while his father, who has cancer, has to face certain death.

At the same time, Maggie competes with Brick’s brother’s wife, Mae, for Big Daddy’s affections and the family inheritance.

Director Anthony Page’s engrossing production uses the Broadway ending suggested by the original director, Elia Kazan, and a lot more hopeful than Williams’s original version. But Page has added some lines from the more pessimistic draft, making this production a hybrid.

While Maria Bjornson’s stage design - fragile, white-slatted walls and blue-grey haze - neatly sums up Williams’s idea of life in the steamy South, Page encourages his cast to face the audience, appealing for sympathy. His use of subdued lighting in act two emphasises Big Daddy’s speech about the inevitability of death, with atmospheric shadows.

But if Brendan Fraser, the square-jawed action man of the film The Mummy, looks the part of Brick, he doesn’t go much further than portraying what Maggie calls his “detached quality” as a rather sulky indifference, exhausted, withdrawn, too sozzled even to hate. Not until the end of his epic scene with Big Daddy does Fraser shows some passion.

By contrast, Frances O’Connor‘s Maggie is full of vitality. Wiry, jagged and frustrated, with a voice like a siren and hands like flexed claws, she signals her determination to hang on to her husband.

Even more appealing is Ned Beatty’s Big Daddy, a coarse, self-made man who barnstorms through life, but who wiggles his foot like an anxious child when he’s worried about dying from cancer.

In a production that underlines Mae’s vulgarity and the sugary way she uses her children to entertain Big Daddy at his birthday party, Page makes it clear that Williams’s ambivalent ideas about the difference between lies and truth can be as relevant and as troubling as ever.

ALEKS SIERZ

Lyric Theatre, Shaftesbury Avenue, London W1 until December 22. Box office: 020 7494 5045