This is a beautiful production of a superb play.
The Glass Menagerie was first produced in 1944, and it launched Tennessee Williams’ career.
This slightly amended version is a poignant meditation on dreams, memory, and regrets.
Blazey Best is absolutely magnificent as Amanda, matriarch of a small house, evoking both laughter and pathos as she presents the fading southern belle, all attitudes, airs and … anguish. Once, in a single afternoon, she had seventeen gentleman callers. Now she worries for her daughter Laura, who has no gentleman callers at all.
Laura has a slight defect in her leg, but suffers more from her crippling shyness. Her life has reduced to playing records and tending her ornamental glass menagerie. Bridie McKim is brilliant as Laura, portraying perfectly her painfully overwhelming self-consciousness, while still finding those heartrending moments where hope glimmers through.
Tom, Laura’s brother, chafes under the responsibility he has to his fatherless family, and can barely endure his banal warehouse job. He also narrates the play, stepping out of the action to muse on the distance between mundanity and magic, between the average life and the adventurous one. Tom is a partially autobiographical creation; he dreams of being a writer, and his family situation is not unlike that of Williams’ youth. Danny Ball is mesmerising in the role, capturing both Tom’s energy and his desperation.
Tom also rankles under his mother’s insistence he find his sister a beau. The tyranny of women snaps back Amanda, with scathing satire.
He brings Jim to dinner.
Tom Rodgers offers a splendid portrait of Jim, bubbling and brimming with naïve enthusiasm. His scene with McKim’s fraught Laura is dramatic gold.
Liesel Badorrek’s production is a wonderful opportunity to see a classic of the American stage.
Paul Gilchrist
The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams
at Ensemble Theatre until 26 April
Image by Prudence Upton
Theatre Red 