Two plays by America’s greatest 20th century playwrights feature in the Young America season, at the Royal& Derngate, under its artistic director Laurie Sansom, until November 14. They are performed by the same ten-strong cast on different nights.

From Eugene O’Neill comes Beyond the Horizon (to be reviewed here next week). This Pulitzer-winning play was read during his student days by Tennessee Williams while he was revising Spring Storm, a work roundly condemned by his classmates. “Well, we all have to paint our nudes,” said his Iowa University tutor, unsympathetic to what would become Williams’s trademark take on upfront sexuality. The script was put aside and not rediscovered until 1996.

This production is the play’s European premiere. Anyone seeing it will marvel that so fine a work should have remained hidden for so long.

Imbued like so much of Williams's later work with the sweaty sexuality and silly snobberies of the Mississippi Delta, it focuses on a passionate young woman, Heavenly Critchfield (Liz White), forced to choose between two men in her life.

On the one hand is Dick Miles (Michael Thomson), a muscular go-getter possessed, as one character puts it, of “a primitive masculinity that makes a girl lose her head”. He is the prototype for so many such men, including Streetcar’s Stanley Kowalski, who figured in Williams’s plays (and, indeed, sex life).

On the other is the bookish, refined, repressed millionaire’s son Arthur Shannon (Michael Malarkey) who says: “I want what I am afraid of, and I’m afraid of what I want.” Step forward Williams himself, who might have been writing of his (then hidden) homosexuality.

No guessing who wins the backing of Heavenly’s mother (Jacqueline King), the same Southern Belle – Williams’s mater, of course – present in so many of his plays. But her good sort dad (James Jordan) and his sister (Joanna Bacon) are less inclined to lay down the law in the matter.

This tautly scripted, superbly acted play does not proceed to a predictable conclusion, however, chiefly as a consequence of Arthur’s involvement with an earnest young librarian (Anna Tolputt) with a secret passion for him.

Box office: 01604 624811 (www.royalandderngate.co.uk).