In May 1957, with some trepidation, Tennessee Williams went into analysis under the care of the fashionable psychiatrist Lawrence Kubie, known to his distinguished clientèle as Dr Sugar. Kubie insisted that Williams should temporarily separate from his partner of the time, Frank Merlo, and give up drink and writing. With a sense of relief, Williams banished the tempestuous Merlo to Florida and even managed, for a short while, to stop drinking, but the compulsion to write was too strong to break. ‘I was bored not working,’ Williams said. ‘I began to cheat. I’d get up at four, type a few hours and then I felt fresh. The doctor finally surrendered.’ The result of this early-morning compulsion was Suddenly Last Summer.

The analysis stirred up those feelings of remorse and guilt about his family that were never far beneath the surface. The one constant love in his life was his sister, Rose, who, as a disturbed young woman, had horrified and embarrassed their mother, Edwina, with her aggressive and sexually overt outbursts. After various forms of treatment had failed, Edwina finally arranged for Rose to have a lobotomy, a procedure that was then in a very early experimental phase. For the rest of her long life – Rose outlived both her mother and brother – Rose existed in a twilight state of bewilderment. During his sessions with Kubie, Williams confronted both his anger towards Edwina for arranging Rose’s mutilation and his guilt with himself for not coming to his sister’s defence and preventing it.