Sex takes a leading, pleading role in almost all Tennessee Williams's best plays. His ill-adjusted characters succumb to nymphomania, homosexuality and self-repression with neurotic dedication.

This spectacular, revolving-stage production of The Rose Tattoo marks one of those rare and unconvincing instances in which Williams tries to persuade us to see the funny side of sexual desires and neuroses that normally lead to catastrophe in his dramas.

The playwright wrote it when he was happy and, creatively speaking, happiness did not suit him. The play has only been twice revived in London these last 49 years and it soon becomes clear why.

The blueprint for the production was Steven Pimlott's, but after he was tragically struck down by a recurrence of cancer Nicholas Hytner took over.

The idea has been to treat Williams's overblown romanticism with reverent faithfulness. It does not work. An air of preposterousness and contrivance clouds the dusky, cicada-laden scene which is dominated by Mark Thompson's revolving bungalow set.

Sexual desire, a death-obsession and the iron grip of the Catholic Church pull here in three opposing directions. Zoe Wanamaker's Sicilian-American, Serafina delle Rose, a lower-middle class seamstress in a Gulf Coast village, is the person pulled and pulling.

Wanamaker, daringly cast as this pregnant, thirty-something Serafina, puts on an exhilarating, impressive show to persuade us to overlook her maturity and to accept the play's crude psychology: hot for sex until her husband is killed or murdered, Serafina turns cool, prim and proper with her boy-hungry daughter, dresses in no more than underwear as she mopes about the house and mourns an adulterous husband.

An Italianate Wanamaker makes comic and pathetic sense of a Serafina, who is by turns grief-struck, prissy and flustered with embarrassment when sex and ridiculousness strike. A happy ending is imposed like a heatwave in Iceland.

Having rediscovered eros in the blundering, lumbering comic form of Darrell D'Silva's passing truck-driver, Serafina rises next morning a changed woman and, she insists, an instantly pregnant one. She does not care that the cherished ashes of her husband have been lost.

She encourages her teenage daughter (insipid Susannah Fielding), whose virginity she earlier guarded like a desperate nun, to go off to a sailor boy-friend. Sex, as if prescribed by D H Lawrence, has worked an instant, transforming magic.

The casting of the gutsy Wanamaker and the sedate, equally mature D'Silva as Alvaro means that the play's sexual dynamic and its emphasis on relatively youthful desire acquires a middle-aged aspect.

Williams imagined Alvaro as a "glossy young bull" and "very good-looking" with a massive, sculptural torso. He was supposed to be a positive, vulnerable version of Williams's brutal rapist in A Streetcar Named Desire. D'Silva makes him simply a comic fall-guy.

Other irritations accumulate. Devil-substitutes in the shape of Rosalind Knight's long-haired, gym-shoed Strega and a real-life goat keep intruding together with gawping village women and kids. Too much of the dialogue, usually Williams's strong, poetic suit, sounds like eerie premonitions of lyrics for a Lloyd Webber musical: "It's so long since I felt the soft touch of a woman." "You're still eligible for loving again." "All I want is a sign from our lady."

A five-strong band, which keeps breaking into intrusive musical accompaniment, adds to the sense that this wilting Rose Tattoo would like to dare to burst into song.