Summertime and the living is uneasy. In the Deep South, in the heat, the cotton is high and tempers are, too. Archie Lee Meghan is deep in debt; he has lost out in business as operator of the town's cotton gin (the machine that separates the cotton from the seed) to Sicilians, and he is about to lose everything from his pay-as-you-go furniture to his wife, the Baby Doll of the title.
Baby Doll was first produced as a film in 1956, directed by Elia Kazan. What no one could have predicted was that the film would cause outrage and become the most controversial of Tennessee Williams's works. It was denounced by Cardinal Spellman from the pulpit of St Patrick's cathedral as "revolting", "immoral" and "corrupting" and - incoherently - described as a "contemptuous defiance of natural law". Kazan defended it as a moral miniature that combined "passion with farce and tragedy and comedy". Even Williams's father (not always dependable) spoke out to say that he could find nothing wrong with the film.
It had been difficult getting the film off the ground, not least because Williams kept failing to come up with an ending. The ending that he eventually supplied, although it pleased Kazan, is irresolute. It seems more like the end of a scene than of a play.
Lucy Bailey's powerful production (Birmingham Repertory Theatre in collaboration with the National Theatre) is splendidly realised, but it cannot complete what is essentially a sketchy, passionate fragment.
It was Baby Doll herself, presumably, who gave offence. Her emerging sexuality was said to be shocking, especially as it broke free from the confines of marriage. But sexuality in Williams's plays is never simple. And it seems to me that it is not - and maybe never was - the eroticism that was upsetting. Baby Doll is not primarily about sex; it is about revenge. Sex is merely a weapon in a revenger's tragedy. Charlotte Emmerson plays Baby Doll as a fearful, frigid child who sleeps in a cot instead of sharing a bed with her husband. But when her husband's Sicilian rival, Silva Vacarro (Jonathan Cake), swaggers into her life, she starts to thaw. There is a scene on a swing that in the film was condemned as "orgiastic" because of the look Carroll Baker, who was playing Baby Doll, gave Eli Wallach's Silva. But Silva has no more than an incidental lust for Baby Doll; it is revenge that he thirsts for and, most particularly, a signed affidavit from Baby Doll stating that her husband was responsible for the arson that has ruined his business. There is even, in this production, the humiliating possibility that he is not sexually drawn to her at all.
This is a play about violation - of a subtle kind. These characters are abused by life, by poverty and by each other. Victims abound. Baby Doll is a casualty: dim, dysfunctional, pretty. She lives with her aunt Rose (who shares the name of Williams's much-loved, brain-damaged sister). Rose, tenderly played by Georgine Anderson, is simple-minded and fills us with pitying unease. She is bullied by Archie and devastated by ill-treatment: a dreamy, ancient wallflower who lives for the love of chocolate.
And then there is racial violation: the play is full of hatred of "wops", "dagos" and "niggers". Paul Brennen plays Archie as a raging bigot, his tormented face always red as a radish. Delirious anger is the norm for him. It is a pity, because he could be sympathetic as well as offensive - there is room in the script for a more varied take on the part. After all, Archie is a casualty, too.
Bunny Christie's set is a triumph - ambitious and original. The play begins with a tiny oblong of light, a peephole, in which we can see only a red lamp. Gradually the darkness slides away to reveal a cot, a bedroom and then, by degrees, a house open at the front like a derelict doll's house. There is much witty and imaginative homage to cinema. Black and white clouds roll across a screen and the title, Baby Doll, presents itself. Cinematic music is brilliantly used to chaperone Baby Doll, for example, as she leaves the house in a tight yellow skirt.
Tennessee Williams's less well-known plays have been having a field day in London (his Five O'Clock Angel was recently well received at The King's Head). He was incapable of writing a dull line, so that even the more uneven of his plays leave an audience stirred. And Baby Doll reminds us that Williams often wrote with sultry philosophy. Take, for example, Silva's comment to Baby Doll: "People enter this world without instruction . . ."
"Baby Doll" is in repertory at the Lyttelton Theatre, London SE1, until 2 May (020-7452 3000)
