Despair and laughter in equal doses

"Baby, you got a mother complex and I'm gonna make you forget it," the vivacious Myrtle, with a can-do waggle of her lime-green thighs, informs her droopy husband of two days in Lucy Bailey's brilliant, blackly wacky and sometimes tenderly hilarious revival of this Tennessee Williams rarity from 1967. Alas, Myrtle would have about as much luck weaning Norman Bates off his mother as reorient the ailing, secretly TB-ridden and maternally fixated Lot who has inherited the piss-elegant, antique-filled home where mummy and he used to preen preciously as a two-person-band against the rednecks endemic in this district of the Mississippi Delta.

"Infinitely worth seeing" was The Independent's verdict on the unholy hilarity and aching beauty of Gene David Kirk's superlative production of A Cavalier for Milady. But now this world premiere of a late Tennessee Williams play has become the production it is absolutely impossible to see.

The Victorian era is not generally regarded as one that greatly contributed to the progress of British theatre – and now the architecture of the age has scuppered a modern production.

The new Cock's old cock Tennessee Williams season has comprised two short world premieres: one early, and now one late; A Cavalier for Milady, thought to have been written around 1979, is the only published Williams play remaining hitherto unperformed, a real collector's item, and infinitely worth seeing.

Tennessee Williams, who was born 100 years ago today, drew inspiration from the characters who lived in America's Deep South. Chris Coplans follows in the playwright's footsteps

'A Streetcar Named Desire' made Tennessee Williams a household name. But there is more to celebrate on the centenary of his birth. Revivals of neglected works show another side to a tortured figure, says Paul Taylor

A new exhibition reveals the American playwright's battles to stage his plays in post-war London.

After boos, death threats and a breakdown, the enfant terrible of dance returns – this time with a three-act ballet scored by the Pet Shop Boys

Notebook

"The scene is memory and is therefore non-realistic. Memory takes a lot of poetic license," writes Tennessee Williams in his introductory stage direction to the 1944 play that propelled him into the major league of American dramatists. Joe Hill-Gibbins takes him at his word in this magnificent production, a revival that is as conceptually fresh as it is emotionally devastating.

Dario Marianelli won an Oscar and a Golden Globe for his score for the movie Atonement and his return to the theatre after a long absence as composer for the Young Vic's new production of Tennessee Williams' first big Broadway success The Glass Menagerie is hotly anticipated.

Rancid whiffs of cooking hang in the air of this highly charged staging of Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire.

The heavy-set, square-jawed Kevin McCarthy was a distinguished actor with an extensive career in the theatre as well as movies and television, but he will be best remembered for his leading role in one of the most famous of screen science-fiction thrillers, Don Siegel's cult classic, The Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), in which he was a doctor desperate to convince the authorities that the human race is being taken over by "pod people".