What can you get away with in a dream play? As its writer, quite a bit. Tennessee Williams populated his strange, dusty dream town of Camino Real with a plethora of literary characters snatched from centuries past; he recast them as pitiful and desperate people; he provoked Walter Kerr to condemn the play as ‘the worst yet written by the best playwright of [his] generation’. Devoid of linearity and any obvious protagonist, it isn’t the easiest script to stage. And the director of the dream play can’t get away with quite so much as its writer – they’ve got an audience demanding coherence.

So coherence would have been nice. Amidst garbled Spanish accents – raised, far too often, to shrieks – it wasn’t such an easy fish to catch. Add in a guitar, perpetually strummed at the corner of the stage (how very Mexicana), and lines slipped away, taking the audience’s attention with them. Williams’ Camino Real is a prison-like limbo, presided over by smug hotel manager Gutman. Passports are stolen and occupants forced to confront their failures, and yet the place’s sorrow never really prevailed: from music to bold costume, subtleties were swallowed by garish fervour.

The nightmarish quality of Williams’ vision did make it through the hysteria, nicely elicited by the actors out of the spotlight: they clustered at the outskirts on filthy bed linen and hung over the action with vague interest. Abdullah, Gutman’s sycophant, was a constant loathsome presence, cackling amidst angst and contorting at hardships in glee. David Lynch-like figures would sporadically lurch across stage, eerie enough without their painted faces and erratic costumes. There’s rarely need for the donning of one Converse, and there was no need to camp up the terror.  The most excruciating scene saw Marguerite (poached from Dumas’ The Lady of the Camellias) missing the single plane out of the place, her panic ever more profound as “lost” documents saw the single chance for freedom fly away. That’s how dreams convert themselves to theatre best: in turns helpless, confused and tender, they are fascinating not only for their surrealism, but their psychology.