A young wandering musician, Val, arrives in a small town in the American South. In this closed, male-dominated and racist society, the young man exerts a subtle charm and has the downtrodden local women vying for his attentions. They include Lady, married to the dying but domineering Torrance, who sees Val as the man who might change her life. However, her dream of running away with him comes to nothing. The deeply conservative place knows how to protect itself and eliminate such a dangerous “parasite”.  

This season, the National Theatre presents a rare outing in Greece for one of Tennessee Williams’s most poetic works, a retelling of the myth of Orpheus in the America of the 1950s, in which a suffocating, hidebound society is the underworld and the travelling musician the liberator of those who feel trapped in it. The National Theatre has invited Barbara Weber, one of Europe's most exciting young theatre directors and joint artistic director of Zurich’s Theater Neumarkt, to bring her own interpretation of the play to the stage, with a cast of exceptional actors.