In the following critique, reviewer John Lahr discusses how Williams' Sweet Bird of Youth displays the subtleties between achievement and destruction and expresses Williams' fascination with America's competitive drive.

Sweet Bird of Youth (1959), currently being revived at the Royal National Theatre, in London, picks up Williams' story at the panicky moment of the hardening of his spiritual arteries. In Sweet Bird of Youth, the most underrated of his great plays, two self-confessed monsters, Chance Wayne and the Princess Kosmonopolis, a.k.a. Alexandra Del Lago, act out the division in Williams' warped heart between being big and being good. The sense that time is running out on the Princess's career and, as his name implies, on Chance's opportunity is what gives the play its peculiar giddy climate of frenzy. Richard Eyre's vivid but unsubtle production— what might be considered an acrylic version— nonetheless allows us...