What’s more beautiful than a rose? Not much, to Serafina, the heroine of Tennessee Williams’s sweet and sweaty drama, first performed in 1950. She’s the Sicilian seamstress widow of Rosario delle Rose, who until his violent death transported gangster contraband in his banana truck along the coast from New Orleans, and mother of Rosa, a lovely daughter bursting from bud to bloom. Rose was also the name of Williams’s beloved, tormented sister. And The Rose Tattoo — one of three current Williams revivals in London — swells to bursting point with feeling.

Blending comedy and agony with the grotesque, rhapsodic and carnivalesque, the play exuberantly celebrates the way in which hope can be born of despair. Poignantly, this production was conceived and briefly rehearsed by Steven Pimlott until his death last month, when Nicholas Hytner took over its direction.

Williams weaves together his themes with reckless theatrical panache. The struggle between Serafina’s maternal and sexual selves, and between patriarchal religion and womanly desire, are set against passing time, symbolised by a wristwatch she has bought as a graduation present for Rosa. Time draws us all towards the grave; love defies it.

The production makes the play’s intensely feminine world teem with colour without overcrowding the central drama. Women in headscarves gossip or flock, wailing, in black veils.

Children chase a real, woolly, curly-horned goat in a riotous game that turns sinister as the beast comes to symbolise cuckoldry and devilment; its owner is the cackling Strega, or witch, who lives next door.

It all has a seductive dreaminess, and Zoë Wanamaker’s Serafina is an irresistible creature of sensuality. She purrs with pleasure after a recent night of lovemaking that she imagines branded her body with the rose tattoo her husband bore on his chest — a sure sign, she believes, that she has conceived. The purr becomes the growls and howls of a wounded animal as she suffers the triple blow of her husband’s death, a miscarriage and the news, three years later, that Rosario was unfaithful. This cruel trinity leaves her half-dead; but her life force flickers when she haughtily interrogates Rosa’s sailor boyfriend, whose tight trousers and earring both cause her concern and, to judge by the wicked twinkle in Wanamaker’s eye, arouse her interest. And her pulse quickens again after the arrival of Darrell D’Silva’s virile, hulking, sweet-natured truck driver Alvaro.

Their scenes together, in particular, are pungent with needy, big-hearted humanity. There’s a madness to this writing, but it is the joyous madness of love and of life. Hytner and Pimlott are true to the wildness of Williams’s spirit, and make no attempt to tame its excesses. That might make the whole seem a little crazy; it’s also what makes it a creation of ripe, shameless, full-blown beauty.

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