Repeatedly, his plays carry the legacy of his repressive Deep South upbringing: his drunken, boorish father Cornelius, resurrected as Big Daddy in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof his 'frigid' mother, Edwina the 'hysteric', reborn as Amanda Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie his vulnerable, lobotomised sister Rose, haunting The Glass Menagerie and Suddenly, Last Summer and through all of his work, his own traumatic relationship to sexuality and madness. For Lahr, Williams is 'the most autobiographical of playwrights'. It is fitting that Lahr should weave together Williams' life with a critique of his work and its reception. The book seduces with all the gaudy lure of Broadway, only to plunge us into the dark loneliness of the empty, darkened stage as Williams moves from early success to alcoholism, paranoia and failure. Stepping sideways through time, weaving behind-the-scenes stories with insightful analyses of Williams' work, Lahr creates a tapestry of his subject's life and career that is at once both compelling and appalling. With a critic's keen eye, Lahr engages not so much in a work of biography as a work of dramaturgy. Lahr is a creature of the theatre and, despite its seemingly daunting length (over 700 pages), this enthralling and detailed work sustains dramatic tension throughout. Taking on the mantle of Leverich's scholarship, Lahr has created a work that is nonetheless entirely his own: a wonderful combination of the dry wit so evident in his earlier Joe Orton biography, Prick Up Your Ears, of theatrical acumen, and of sympathetic engagement with his subject that is still honest enough to show the monster in the man.

Lahr inherited this project from an earlier, ill-fated biography by Lyle Leverich – a work that had been stalled in acrimonious legal battles with Williams' literary executor Lady Maria St Just ('neither a lady, nor a saint, nor just'). This biography is far from merely a collection of theatrical tall tales, however. This kind of juicy anecdote peppers Lahr's tome, and the vivid colour with which he paints this backstage world is one of the book's many pleasures. Of course the play is a huge hit: Taylor gives the performance of her life, the audience is spell-bound, and the cast take 24 curtain calls.

The opening night seems a catalogue of disasters: Taylor is blind drunk and can only walk on stage after several jugs of coffee and cans of tomatoes, Act I becomes Act II, as lines and cues are missed, and vomit buckets block the wings as Taylor revisits her stomach contents between scenes. Magnificently readable: Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh by John Lahr.

Tennessee Williams by John Lahr