Orpheus Descending ***
Donmar Warehouse, London

Anyone who still doubts that Tennessee Williams was a deeply political writer should see Orpheus Descending. This is a portrait of the American south as hell, a place beset with racism, bigotry and violence. The pity of it is that Williams's undeniable passion is almost buried under the deafening sound of clashing symbols. Myths are clearly in the air. We are in a southern dry goods store ruled over by the Sicilian, Lady Torrance. Her husband, Jabe, is a dying relic whom we discover was involved in the burning of her father's wine garden on the grounds that he sold liquor to black customers.

Enter Val Xavier, an itinerant guitar player in a snakeskin jacket who takes a job in the store, offers Lady the southern comfort she has been sorely missing, and excites the anger of the local rednecks who are baying for blood in the bayou.

Nowhere else does Williams offer such a vicious portrait of the American south. Against this he sets his ageing Eurydice, the Orpheus-like visitor who sympathises with the desperate cries of a chain-gang fugitive and a wayward local beauty who laments the loss of "a wild sort of sweetness" in a land that is sick with neon.

As so often with Williams, the free-spirited confront a world of brute materialism and go down fighting. At its best, in the tender encounters between Lady and Val, the play has a singing poetry. But the exposition is laborious in the extreme and the symbolism becomes top heavy. Val turns into a mixture of Orpheus and Christ.

Written in 1957, the play offers a curious mix of Williams at his best and worst. But Nicholas Hytner's coolly intelligent production is worth seeing for the acting alone. Helen Mirren's Lady Torrance is an exemplary study of an immigrant woman who has acquired a patina of resilient toughness but who slowly acknowledges her sensuality. Stuart Townsend, lean and capable of a poised stillness, is no less compelling and avoids all the cliches of the drifting Don Juan. Saskia Reeves as the isolated local temptress, Richard Durden as Lady's death-stricken husband, and William Hootkins as the burly sheriff add to the sense that we are encountering a community.

Some productions swathe the play in atmosphere. But Hytner has uncovered it and revealed a work that, for all its imperfections, is filled with Williams's hatred of oppression.

• Until August 19. Box office: 020- 7369 1732. This review appeared in some editions yesterday.