Australian director Benedict Andrews likes to update classics. His 2012 version of Chekhov’s Three Sisters at the Young Vic was updated to the present, and so, too, is this high definition revival of Tennessee Williams’s 1955 classic, with Sienna Miller playing the sexually neglected Maggie and rising-star Jack O’Connell as Brick, her tormented, alcoholic husband.

It’s a performance in which their bodies, both of which are exposed in this raw and explicit production, speak volumes. She’s the southern belle whose looks elevated her from poverty into one of the richest families on the Mississippi delta, while he is the former American football star haunted by the loss of a friendship that was gay in all but name. Much of this is evoked by Miller’s feather-light and slender frame, and O’Connell’s form, which is big in the biceps department.

Andrews cleverly exploits all this physical beauty. His production is saturated with the tension of a marital bedroom in which sex no longer happens. And although the action is usually set in the Mississippi mansion owned by Brick’s father Big Daddy (played here with alpha male bravura by Colm Meaney) the director keeps all the action in the couple’s unhappy room.

The occasion is Big Daddy’s 65th birthday. Family members constantly trespass into Maggie and Brick’s private misery. None are less welcome than the childless Maggie’s fecund sister-in-law Mae (Hayley Squires), an arch-manipulator of family politics whose prime objective is to promote her husband (and Brick’s less favoured brother) into the position of inheritor when Big Daddy dies.

To accentuate the modernity, music is conjured from a wireless, bedside console. Big Daddy’s wife Big Mama (a superbly vulgar Lisa Palfrey) often enters scenes while cackling into an iPhone.

But there is a price to pay for the updating. Just as with Andrews’s Three Sisters it was hard to credit that the siblings were unable to get to their longed-for Moscow in these days of short-haul flights so, too, it is difficult to accept that the damage caused by Brick being in the closet about his sexuality would be as extensive today as it was in Williams’s day. Even in Mississippi.

Sometimes, there is no such disconnect. In Andrews’s terrific 2014 updated production of A Streetcar Named Desire (which was also at The Young Vic) Gillian Anderson’s Blanche was as convincing now as she would have been if the production had been set in the 1950s. For Blanche is a fantasist in every era.

But even where you have to suspend some extra disbelief, as is the case here, Andrews can re-energise a classic like few other directors. And with this one the logic created in the confines of one room reigns supreme. Designer Magda Willi’s windowless, gilded interior has the feel of a luxury prison — one where the visitors are unwanted. Brick spends most of the play drinking to trigger the peaceful “click” in his head that comes when he has drunk enough alcohol. The play starts with four full bottles of whiskey lined up downstage. By the end, they are all empty, as is the cellophane sack of ice with which he makes countless highballs. With his leg in plaster from some drunken hijinks the night before he can’t even escape the unwanted conversations with his family, much less his state of mind.

Despite spending much of the time under a shower, O’Connell is a smouldering, coiled presence throughout. And Miller captures the painful paradox of being alluring while unable to lure her husband into bed.