TENNESSEE Williams was one of those writers who created a special world, a steamy jungle of the emotions "in which pathos and perversity twined around each other like tropical plants.

The two plays under the portmanteau title of Garden District, now at the Focus, are unmistakably from that world, fascinating studies of people under stress.

Something Unspoken, the shorter piece, features a rich old lady and her companion secretary.

The employer is seeking to retain her power base in a snob organisation called the Confederate Daughters. As she pursues her campaign by phone, the asides to her secretary reveal the vacuum which underlies her social pretensions, and also the resentment which seethes beneath her employee's subservience.

Aileen Fennell and Stephanie Dunne are solid in their roles.

The second piece, almost a full length play in itself, is Suddenly Last Summer. Here another wealthy matriarch seeks to have a niece lobotomised to keep her from narrating an ostensibly incredible story about her dead son.

The two had gone on holidays the previous summer and a young doctor is brought in to consider the niece's condition, and her suitability for the operation.

What emerges is vintage Williams, a tale of sex and obsession which grips like a vice. By the end we know so much about the characters: the mother's blind devotion, the unseen son's nature, the disturbed niece and her rapacious family.

It is given a major performance from Deirdre O'Connell as the mother, with very strong support from Paul Roe's doctor and Elizabeth P. Moynihan's niece.

Paul Keeley directs both plays with a sensitivity which finds the truth in them.