The Glass Menagerie, King’s Theatre, Edinburgh, review: Emotional dances at the International Festival

Director John Tiffany was behind the National Theatre of Scotland's Black Watch in 2006, as well as the all-conquering Harry Potter and the Cursed Child

Kate O'Flynn as Laura and Seth Numrich as Jim in The Glass Menagerie (Johan Persson)

The greatest hit of the Edinburgh festival's recent past and the biggest British theatre story of 2016 are linked in this modestly scaled but perfectly formed import. From its original venue at the Loeb Drama Centre for the American Repertory Theatre, it makes ,its UK debut here as part of the Edinburgh International Festival. The connection, of course, is director John Tiffany, the central creative force behind the National Theatre of Scotland's huge hit Black Watch in 2006, and also the director of the West End's current, all-conquering Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. This adaptation of Tennessee Williams' breakthrough 1944 play couldn't be further removed from either, although it did transfer to Broadway and earn Tiffany his second Tony nomination.

In wartime St Louis, shoe warehouseman and aspiring poet Tom Wingfield lives in faded working class, almost-security, with his mother Amanda. She is an eager matriarch with high ambitions, mostly for herself, and his older sister Laura, her foot lame from a youthful bout of polio and her confidence shot to pieces by a life of shy seclusion. Two more unseen presences loom: the children's father, long since gone but still present in photographs, and later, Laura's collection of glass animals, a form of safe and perfect companionship of the kind she finds easiest to handle.

Tom is the breadwinner of the family, but Amanda has designs on securing a new source of income - namely, on convincing a "gentleman caller" to come to the apartment and be seduced by the sadly rather unseductive Laura into marrying into the family. Her daughter, says the ageing former debutante Amanda, must learn charm. "You make it seem like we're setting a trap," says Laura. "We are," says her mother, smiling in anticipation. But this is no viper's nest.

The beautiful post-war moment when anything may be possible is so close you can taste it

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For all her desperate planning, Amanda only wants the security for her and the children that keeping her husband would have secured them. Laura is sweet and kind-hearted, but damaged physically and emotionally, and Tom is an analogue of the young Williams, torn between duty to family and the desire to break out and explore his own art and self.

Considering this is a Tiffany play, and his regular movement director Steven Hoggett is once again alongside him, it's a surprisingly subdued piece. Laura enters literally through the sofa and Amanda appears behind a screen like a ghost but aside from these sparks of movement, the characters step rather than dance. Bob Crowley's eye-catching set compensates for this stillness with hexagonal platforms adrift on a still lake and fire escape stairs zig-zagging upwards like a lightning bolt.

Yet the emotional dances between the three family members and the eventual gentleman caller Jim are expressive and wonderful. Michael Esper's Tom is a buttoned-up dreamer dying to break free; original cast member and Broadway stalwart Cherry Jones is uptight to the point of regular and unintended hilarity; Kate O'Flynn's Laura is wonderful, gossamer fragile but spurred to the beginnings of a deep awakening by the end.

The need for security, for status, especially in times of uncertainty, is universal and in Seth Numrich's Jim the rest of the 20th century as we knew it awaits it's birth - aspiring to high principle, but compromised by base desire. In this play, however, the beautiful post-war moment when anything may be possible is so close you can taste it.

Until Sunday 21 August