Tennessee Williams is the Anton Chekhov of American theatre.

Like Chekhov's plays, his dramas are imaginatively theatrical, powerfully psychological and deeply, often subtly, political. Like Chekhov, he is too often misunderstood as a narrow realist.

I was excited, therefore, by the prospect of Dundee Rep's joint artistic director Jemima Levick giving Williams's great dream play The Glass Menagerie the kind of intelligently non-naturalistic staging it demands. Sadly, assiduously resistant to realism though it is, her production never quite captures the power inherent in the writing.

For a start, there's Levick's decision to include Williams's needlessly expository prologue for Tom Wingfield, brother of Laura, the shy, slightly physically disabled young woman who owns the titular collection of glass animals. As Tom, standing in for the dramatist himself, speaks into a microphone, putting the play in its historico-political and aesthetic contexts, it isn't difficult to see why many directors consider the introduction to be redundant.

Unfortunately, the prologue is not the only redundant feature of this production. As matriarch Amanda Wingfield attempts desperately to secure for Laura an eligible "gentleman caller", Levick makes a series of aesthetically disappointing choices.

The Wingfield's working-class apartment is given a suitably hyper-real imagining. However, one has to question surrounding it with an external set constituted of shiny surfaces and multi-coloured lights, which looks like a poor pastiche of a 1960s sci-fi movie.

To this the director adds some modish, but dreadful, choreographed mime (presumably, an attempt to emote non-naturalistically). This succeeds only in alienating one further from the play and making it impossible for Irene Macdougall (who plays Amanda with skill and precision) and the three younger members of the cast to deliver this potentially affecting piece with any real sense of conviction.