First Night: The Rose Tattoo, Olivier National Theatre, London

Tennessee Williams' 1950 play The Rose Tattoo is a buoyantly comic celebration of life and its inexhaustible capacity for breaking free from the past.

The piece even includes its own irreverent form of resurrection. So it was an agonisingly ironic blow when Steven Pimlott, who had planned and cast this revival while in remission from throat cancer, died just a few days into rehearsal.

The company and Nick Hytner, who took over the direction, honour his memory by bringing the work to fruition in the attractive, life-affirming production that has just opened in the Travelex £10 season.

Set in the community of Sicilian immigrants in a village on the Gulf Coast, The Rose Tattoo focuses on Serafina delle Rose, a widowed middle-aged seamstress. In the three years since her truck-driver husband was killed, she has withdrawn from life and become a recluse. She idolises her dead spouse, whose ashes she keeps in an urn and boasts of his sexual prowess and their idyllic physical rapport.

But her aggressively complacent refusal to move on is disturbed by three developments. She is confronted by information that suggests her husband may not have been the paragon of fidelity she had supposed.

Her fifteen-year-old daughter, Rosa, falls for a young sailor and has to be put under virtual house arrest. And then up rolls another Sicilian truck driver, called Alvaro, whose body has an uncanny resemblance to that of her deceased hubby.

The idea of the play seems like it might be more enjoyable than the actual experience of watching it. English actors don't find it easy to plug into hot Latin passion, and the portrayal of the community has a rather deliberate and unspontaneous feel here, with the half-hearted gaggle of kids and chorus of squabbling women. The goat that keeps breaking loose is a real-life horned ram, but the creature is so docile that it looks more like a symbol of sedation than of frustrated libido .

There's a great surge of comic energy in the second act, though, thanks to the arrival of Darrell D'Silva's adorably funny Alvaro. Stocky in his soiled vest, he's an accident-prone clownish parody of a male hunk and he brings the spirit of opera buffa to the proceedings.

Serafina is torn between the past and the temptations of sexual attraction. But here, lust is a force for optimistic renewal.

Not an actress who normally paints in splashy primary colours, Zoe Wanamaker seemed in prospect to be odd casting as the explosive force of nature that is Serafina. But she brings compelling intensity, pain and (in the second half) some delectably timed comedy to the role, as when she struggles with her girdle in undignified panic just as lover-boy is showing up for a tryst.

True, this play that is rampant with rose-imagery peers at the world through rose-tinted spectacles, but by the end it, it would be a hard heart that failed to surrender to its generous adult fairytale vision.

Exclusive Reader Offer

Independent readers can see The Rose Tattoo on Tuesday 24 April and claim a free pre-show drink and a programme at the National Theatre. Tickets are £10. To book, call the National Theatre Box Office on 020 7452 3000 and quote 'Independent' (subject to availability).