Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Timeless and dated

Plus: Sex With Strangers at the Hampstead is just literary escapism for anxious scribblers

issue 11 February 2017

Tennessee Williams’s breakthrough play is a portrait of his dysfunctional family. A young writer, Tom (Williams’s real name), lives with his effusively domineering mother and his painfully coy sister, Laura. Mother, once a famous beauty, gets Tom to find an eligible chap for Laura. Tough call. Beautiful Laura has a deformed ankle and she’s just flunked out of secretarial college after suffering the embarrassment of vomiting over her type-writer.

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