The adventurous Arcola, which specialises in neglected and little-known work from home and abroad, now takes a disappointing, conventional turn. Bill Bryden directs an engaging, well orchestrated revival of a late, under-par Tennessee Williams tragi-comedy. If only the choice had been bolder.

It could have fallen on the playwright’s Clothes for a Summer Hotel, which involves the
asylum-incarceration of Scott Fitzgerald’s wife, or a stage realisation of Williams’s screenplay, Secret Places of the Heart, again with a mental hospital milieu. For these two late works, not yet seen in London, revealed Williams’s almost-burnt out talent in an Indian summer blaze.

By contrast, Small Craft Warnings, admired at its 1973 London premiere, assembles an all-too familiar collection of lost hopers, derelicts and lovelorn loners from the Tennesse Williams museum of outcasts, placing them in a bar on the Californian coast.

Playing Williams’s alter ego, a writer saddled with gay self-loathing and an unsuitable pick-up, Greg Hicks brilliantly registers jaded disillusionment but cannot disguise the fact that this one character would never have stayed in the bar. The others are different.

Meredith MacNeil’s venereally-challenged, diaphanously costumed Violet, drifts around like a doped, more up-front Blanche du Bois, her hands exploring down between the legs of Steve Nicolson’s Bill. Nicolson looks too mature as the bit of bisexual rough stuff loosely entwined with Leona, a travelling beautician.

But Leona, one of Williams’s tough-talking, foul-mouthed and lonesome broads, is played up to the comic, pugnacious hilt by the hilarious Sian Thomas, revelling in a corn-cracker voice and a talent to abuse.

Miss Thomas’s blistering encounter with Violet, to whom the wonderful Miss MacNeil lends a glazed torpor and bemused desperation as she clings to her last lifebuoy, Jack Shepherd’s compassionate barman, breaks this long-winded evening’s stasis.
Williams’s characters are weighed down by lots of symbols and excessive alcohol: there is even a drunken, struck-off doctor. They spend their time revealing their inner selves in plotless chatter, word-wars and revelatory soliloquies out of kilter with the play’s realism.

They are the small craft of the title, buffeted by life’s waves. Thick fog ensures no one can see their way out of the engulfing murkiness. Even the dead sailfish hung above the bar probably signifies something.

Yet there is something attractive and bracing about the stoicism of these lonely Small Craft people, facing up to hard home truths.

Until 18 October. Information: 020 7503 1646.