We may try to kid ourselves otherwise, but for every one of us, all roads eventually lead to the cemetery. So it's worth taking a detour via Bolton, a place which may not qualify as the Elysian Fields, but where something rather remarkable is happening. Now in his second season as artistic director, David Thacker continues to take audiences on a rewarding journey through Shakespeare and 20th-century classics, matching great writing with astute productions. It's a reminder that audiences willingly rise to the challenge of meaty programming when they feel confidence in their local theatre, and that directors do their best work when they have a real passion for a play.
This delicately pitched revival of Tennessee Williams's great play is crammed into the centre of the stage, with the audience up close and personal so that you can never doubt the lack of privacy in the tiny New Orleans apartment where the broken Blanche DuBois comes to stay with her sister, Stella, and Stella's Polish-American husband, Stanley. The battle between Blanche and Stanley over living space is a microcosm of the greater battle that the two wage over Stella and for control of the future – a future that doesn't have room for both of them.
Perhaps this revival misses the dangerous spark of electricity necessary to make the relationship between Kieran Hill's beefy Stanley and Clare Foster's Blanche really ignite, but there are other compensations, most notably in the relationship between Blanche and Stella (Amy Nuttall). It's not just the red hair that marks these two out as sisters, it is their easy complicity, shared gestures and memories.
If Blanche and Stanley battle over the future, Blanche and Stella are trying to protect the past – childhood innocence itself. In Ciaran Bagnall's design, the tram tracks that bring Blanche from the past to a future reliant on "the comfort of strangers" cut across Stella and Stanley's kitchen, a reminder that it is only a temporary rest-stop in Blanche's journey towards destruction.
Foster is terrific as the wounded Blanche, still bright-eyed and steely as she struggles for survival like a bird caught in the grasp of a hunter. Nuttall is passionate as the sister who must betray Blanche for the sake of her own marriage and child, and Huw Higginson brings complexity to Mitch, the would-be beau. I wept as Blanche walked from the house that proves no haven on the arm of the asylum doctor, her head held high, every inch a lady.
Until 9 October. Box office: 01204 520661.
