HEAVILY influenced by a summer Tennessee Williams spent in Tahiti in 1940, The Night of The Iguana is an odd mixture of elements.

It’s like a jigsaw puzzle whose striking individual pieces are all present but, assembled as a whole, fails to live up to expectations.

Rae Smith’s tropical set — a Mexican hotel that’s little more than a few corrugated shacks overlooking the sea adjoining an imposing rock face — is the faintly allegorical setting for a diverse group of people who, breaking or ending their journeys, deliberate on and remonstrate about their lives.

After seducing the one underage girl in a busload of stern Texan Baptist women, Clive Owen’s disgraced Reverend Shannon, troubled by his own demons, deserts his post as tour guide in order to seek his own purgatory.

While Owen gives a passionate and committed performance as a man challenged by his faith and his sexual desires who’s at the end of his tether, he lacks the feverish intensity that might prevent his breakdown seem narcissistically self-indulgent. As the pivotal figure for the two central female characters, this works against their concern for him.

Both Maxine Gunn’s recently bereaved hotel owner — the supposedly voluptuous aspect of womanhood looking for a new sexual partner — and Lia Williams’s waifish, philosophic and penniless stranger, the chaste and compassionate isolate, are rather inexplicably drawn towards him.

Other emblematic characters include Julian Glover’s dignified nonagenarian former poet, who’s losing his senses while dragging his failing body on his final quest for a long-awaited poetic inspiration. And there’s a bizarre group of athletic Germans celebrating the wartime bombing of London.

Director James Macdonald works hard to make these disparate individuals gel. But the characters who’ve arrived at this end-of-the-road destination do not share enough to engage us beyond their isolated performances.

Human endurance is the theme but the characters remain locked in their own personas and whether this is a failing of William’s play or the production, it’s difficult to tell.

Runs until September 28, box office: noelcowardtheatre.co.uk