LONDON — A dark night of the soul is gradually and movingly illuminated in “The Night of the Iguana,” the infrequently seen Tennessee Williams play that in fact anatomizes three souls in free fall. Widely thought to be the last great contribution from a writer who went into theatrical decline, the play is receiving a welcome revival at the Noël Coward Theater through Sept. 28.

James Macdonald’s production features the film actor Clive Owen’s impassioned return to the London stage for the first time in 18 years, and it brings this 2005 Oscar nominee (“Closer”) into the orbits of the London theater veteran Lia Williams and the visiting American actress Anna Gunn, a two-time Emmy winner for “Breaking Bad.” How do three such distinct performers coalesce? Very well indeed, in a memorably poetic version of a leisurely play that asks for an audience’s patience and rewards it.

Mr. Owen, with a spot-on American accent, plays T. Lawrence Shannon, a defrocked priest with an appetite for underage girls who finds himself in Mexico in a new and reluctant guise as tour guide to a busload of Americans who want him fired. Although the play was written in 1961, it takes place in 1940, which allows the playwright to stir a grinning collection of Nazi-sympathizing Germans into this strange brew.

Despite a large and bustling cast, the action is distilled into a chamber trio, with Shannon ricocheting between the fleshy embrace of the recently widowed hotel owner Maxine (Ms. Gunn, in an expert British stage debut) and the hard-won wisdom of the mystical Hannah. The latter is an artist who has arrived at the hotel accompanied by her grandfather, a nonagenarian poet agonizing his way through one final poem, and she gives emotional succor to the angst-ridden Shannon. Ms. Williams brings a fierce resolve to arguably the play’s defining role: a near saint who couldn’t be further from the neurotic women that populate many a Tennessee Williams play. (It’s Shannon, in this instance, who exists in a state verging on collapse.)