Orpheus Descending, Royal Exchange Manchester, review At first I thought the Royal Exchange had unusually good taste, playing Bessie Smith and John Lee Hooker in the foyer before this play began. It turned out, however, it was scene-setting. The blues runs deep in Orpheus Descending, written in 1940 and closed by censorship, then revised in 1957 when Tennessee Williams was a star. This drama - which in fact retains something of a younger artist's excitability - is steeped in the bloody past of the American South. Lynchings are local sport. The "n" word is bandied as freely as in gangsta rap. The howls of "chain-gang dogs" are distantly heard, as is their atavistic satisfaction when an escaped prisoner is caught. Caught in a different way is Lady Torrance, whose life was changed forever when her father - "a wop bootlegger" - was set alight in his garden after selling drink to a black man. Lady, as played by Imogen Stubbs, has a heavy Sicilian accent and a wry womanly fatalism. She is married to an old man, Jabe, who throughout much of the play is confined to a bedroom (although his presence always looms). Meanwhile, she runs Jabe's general store - cleanly evoked by designer Paul Wills, with a large wooden counter and rather pathetic heaps of shoeboxes - and dreams of recreating the "wine orchard" in which her father died. The possibility of rescue comes with the appearance of Valentine Xavier (excellent Luke Norris), a handsome young drifter to whom Lady gives work. This "Orpheus," under whose touch she flowers by delicate degrees, carries not a lute but a guitar: his acoustic strumming is echoed by the elegant electric licks of Trevor Michael Georges, who sits above the circular stage. Occasionally he descends to play the sole black character, with whom only the febrile outcast Carol (superb Jodie McNee) will engage. The rest - a chorus of respectable print-frocked ladies and brutish men - burn with the faux-religious desire to keep their wretched world pure. Tennessee Williams has never been my cup of bourbon, but now I think that what I really disliked was all that decorating with "Southern" ambience. Here, under Sarah Frankcom's beautiful direction, the play is presented with a truth and austerity that lets the atmosphere rise from within. The entire cast is tremendous. Stubbs, intelligent and infinitely moving, cuts to the pure heart of the playwright better than I have ever seen it done. Until Nov 24.