Twisters and Normal People star Daisy Edgar-Jones proves a force of nature in her first major stage role, playing the trapped and headstrong Maggie in Tennessee Williams’s Mississippi family psychodrama. She gives an intense and physically exact performance as a woman born poor and aware of the currency of her body and its fecundity. There’s intention in every tilt of her shoulders or arch or her bare instep.
But though Maggie is the title character she is not the sole lead. Indeed she’s forced to carry a massive weight of exposition in the first hour, before being shunted offstage entirely for the central section between her alcoholic husband Brick (Kingsley Ben-Adir, bringing nuance to stumbles and slurs) and his brutal plantation-owner father Big Daddy (Lennie James, terrifying).
Director Rebecca Frecknall separates the play’s three acts with an interval and a pause, showing how husband and wife, father and son, and then the entire family lie to themselves and each other. This is her third emotionally distilled but stylistically abstract take on a Williams play at the Almeida after triumphant versions of Summer and Smoke and A Streetcar Named Desire.
Those shows were cast colourblind: here it matters that the dying Big Daddy, the overseer who took over and transformed a cotton plantation owned by two white “sissies”, is Black, while his reviled but adoring wife (Clare Burt, excellent) is white. It adds depth to his ferocity and weight to the issues of inheritance and legacy. Race becomes a factor alongside sexuality, mortality, dominance and duplicity.
Frecknall floats us into a world that’s not the 1950s nor quite modern. The clothes are odd, ugly, non-period. Chloe Lamford’s set is a stark room clad in stamped metal tiles, with three large apertures and a porous fourth wall to facilitate eavesdropping (being observed is a key theme). Pianist Seb Carrington plays jarring chords on a grand piano that doubles as a drinks trolley: he is the ghost of Brick’s football teammate Skipper, the third person in his marriage to Maggie – a deft touch.
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Frecknall has elided several versions of the script and (I think) chucked in a few extra F-bombs. She indulges her penchant for physical expression by having Maggie and at least one other character prowl over the piano like a cat, and just about gets away with it. There’s less wit and urgency here than in some of her work (it dawdles past the three-hour mark). But it is a striking and vivid interpretation that makes a hazily-remembered classic feel new and strange.
Above all, Frecknall is a tremendous director of actors. The sight of Edgar-Jones, imperious atop the piano, made me briefly wonder what she’d be like as St Joan. Brick is a thankless role – even Paul Newman did little with it in the 1958 film – but Ben-Adir makes him profoundly wretched and possibly incontinent. Pearl Chanda works similar magic with the throwaway role of Brick’s sister-in-law Mae – usually a grotesque, but here another victim passing on the family legacy of bullying.
And then there’s Lennie James as Big Daddy: clenched “like a doubled fist” against his secret pain, advancing on family members in an implacable fighter’s crouch, he’s magnetic. It’s thrilling to see Edgar-Jones take the stage, but it’s truly great to have an actor of his calibre back there, too.
Almeida Theatre, to February 1; almeida.co.uk
