A Small Craft of cheerless comedy

The title of this late, little-known Tennessee Williams comedy of losers and itinerants in a Los Angeles beach-front bar sadly serves as metaphoric comment and caution on a dwindling talent. Adrift on seas of alcohol and disillusion, like several characters in this play, Williams had lost his creative grip by the time he came to write Small Craft Warnings in 1972. There are outbursts of the old, dark comedy, and flashes of Williams's rancid poeticism. But there's no longer dramatic impetus or development. This is a world of stasis.

Williams understandably asks in his stage directions for non-realism, with rolling fog instead of bar-room walls. For he tends to turn his back on reality, with spotlit characters baring troubled souls to the audience or speaking in rambles of soliloquies. But for Rufus Norris's atmospheric production designer Jane Singleton provides no more than a dingy bar, where ocean-waves run in counterpoint to the babble and squabble of these refugees from Alcoholics Anonymous.

Williams's familiar cast of lost-hopers are on display, sometimes in cliched, melodramatic form. The suffering femme fatale, the jaunty female who shrugs off age and isolation with alcohol, the sensitive youth and a desensitised version of the vulnerable stud are all brought to the bar by the pull of loneliness. The situation is reminiscent of O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh, though without its moral or spiritual scale. Here everyone flaunts self-knowledge, and the encounters smack of contrivance.

The demure Susannah York is cruelly miscast as a "large ungainly" beautician travelling in a trailer, with a bored hustler and an alcohol problem in tow. Reluctant to shed English middle-class breeding, let alone surrender to drunkeness or crudity, Miss York barks mildly up all the wrong trees. Otherwise performances hit home. Kate Duchene deserves superlatives for her rootless derelict, forever yielding to tears, tantrums and sexual opportunity. Ed Bishop's struck-off alcoholic doctor and John Marquez's hustler, whose talents speak for themselves, induce rueful smiles.

Small Craft Warnings