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).
