1956. The Deep South. Archie Lee, owner of a failing cotton plantation, has married but not bedded his teenage bride, Baby Doll. They have an agreement that he will wait until her 20th birthday. But with the date just two days away, Baby Doll insists that the seizing of almost every stick of furniture from the house for non-payment of bills invalidates their deal. So the desperate Archie sets the rival cotton plantation on fire. He gets his rival's business but is cuckolded and becomes a laughing stock.

When Elia Kazan's film of Baby Doll based on Tennessee Williams's script was released in 1956 it caused outrage because of its sexual explicitness. Time magazine called it "just possibly the dirtiest American-made motion picture that has ever been legally exhibited". Cardinal Spellman denounced it from the pulpit of St Patrick's cathedral in New York with the kind of vigour that would now do wonders for the box office.

Even today the film's poster has an iconic status: the scantily clad Carroll Baker lying in a baby's cot with a thumb in her mouth like some Lolita of the cotton fields. Lucy Bailey's production begins with that image too and the evening, based on her own adaptation of the screenplay, uses light and sliding doors to capture the peeping Tom intensity of the film itself. It makes you feel soiled just to watch it.

But there is no getting away from the fact that Williams's melodrama is a creaky old thing and with the exception of Jonathan Cake's Silva Vacarro, the manager of the rival cotton plantation, who is despised for his Italian ancestry and dark skin, the performances are not strong enough to stop it tipping over into unintentional humour.

There is one fantastic scene. Left alone with Vacarro on a hot afternoon, Baby Doll retreats into the house. Vacarro breaks and enters, leading to a game of hide and seek through the empty rooms that is so sexually charged it feels as if you've held your breath for the entire scene. But for the most part Williams's writing is too crudely explicit and suggestive to be interesting.

There are niggles in the production too: accents that slip not just into different states but different continents, a set which, for all its cleverness, often obscures the view, and in the case of Charlotte Emmerson's too old Baby Doll, a mistaking of vacuity for sexiness.