Despite being a dusted classic, Tennessee Williams’s play about fallen angel Lawrence Shannon the brilliant Clive Owen), who goes through a mental breakdown at Maxine Faulk’s (also fantastic Anna Gunn) verandah leaves the audience with an odd feeling of visiting sunny Puerto Vallarta in Mexico.

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It is quite surprising, how Williams’s play has resisted the tide of time. The story has not aged at all and the world seems to be even more loaded with characters resembling Shannon, Maxine and her guests –and the team at the Noel Coward theatre made great use of it.

She is a recently widowed, mature woman who has loved him for a long time, but as her husband recently dies, she can be open about her feelings. Yet he is unable not only to reciprocate, but to develop any mature feelings.

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He is deeply unhappy and it seems to be his utmost goal: he has just seduced a teenage girl, whom he now despises, and whose mother is justly furious and quite successfully seeks vengeance by getting him fired from the job he hated.

Instead of laughing out loud and finding shelter and peace with Maxine, Shannon ventures on to make himself more miserable: he transfers his interest to another unlikely object, a financially broken painter, Hannah Jelkes (Lia Williams), who begs her way into Maxine’s hotel by cynical use of her grandfather Nonno (Juöian Glover), the oldest poet alive desperately trying to finish his last poem.

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When Mexican butlers catch the iguana and imprison it below the veranda to be eaten later, the story becomes complete. Being powerless, imprisoned and held is a theme not only linking all the characters of the play, but quickly twisting into a very strong knot.