Acting skills of a very high order were on display from students in the Experimental Theatre Club’s welcome revival, ably managed, of Tennessee Williams’s too rarely seen 1958 play Suddenly Last Summer.

The outstanding performance came, as it seemed, in the work of Derek Mitchell (pictured), cross-dressing into the role of a middle-aged, Mid-Western money-bags fighting to save the good name of her poet son, now deceased.

The embarrassing circumstances of his death, in a faraway European resort, are known only to his co-traveller, his institutionalised cousin Catharine whose silence in the matter must be bought at all costs.

Perfect in manner and intonation, and with absolutely no suggestion of camp, Mitchell’s Mrs Venable urged the surgical proceedure of frontal lobotomy – literally cutting out the memory – on the doctor (Cassian Bilton) she set out to bribe.

Exactly this operation was inflicted by Williams’s mother on his sister Rose – just one of the real-life parallels in a strongly autobiographical work.

With Catharine’s arrival came a recognisable picture of Rose, in her wild fury and fierce hunger for cigarettes – and a sensational performance from Mary Higgins.

By turns cowering and defiant, Catharine was made to blurt out, under hypnosis by the doctor, the horrible details of the killing.

Director Sammy Glover cleverly preceded each section of the action with mimed illustrations of earlier traumatic episodes in Catharine’s life.

The garden setting – “a well-groomed jungle alive with wild beasts”, as Williams described it – was admirably presented in well-judged lighting from Stephen Green and music (Ed Maclean and Georgia Bruce) both ominous and plangently beautiful.

This was work of distinction.

CHRISTOPHER GRAY 4/5