The Glass Menagerie (Nuffield, Southampton)
The power of this all-encompassing production of Tennessee Williams‘ 1944 masterpiece is the audience’s complete immersion in Tom Wingfield’s tortured memory.
Directed by Samuel Hodges – the first show he has directed since becoming Nuffield’s Artistic Director and CEO – this production seeks our complicity from the very beginning. Tom, played by Danny Lee Winter, begins his tale from the lighting desk, his opening disclaimer that "the play is memory" captured on camcorder and projected live onto screens beside the stage. This creates at once both a gritty, grainy intimacy and a convenient sense of distance, encapsulating Tom’s efforts to come to terms with the painfulmemories he must recall. As a trip through a family photo album it’s excruciating, but as a piece of theatre it’s gloriously compelling.
Hodges makes excellent use of the contrast between Tom’s up-close monologues and the family dramas played out within the safe, distant box of the proscenium arch. Designer Ultz has created shifting screens, like the apertures of a lens, to explore Tom’s desperation to put his memories within a frame which makes sense to him and, perhaps, to fit them within the parameters of the movies he so loves to escape to.
The small cast excel. Belinda Lang is piercing as matriarch Amanda, her relentless Southern drawl invading every corner of the small apartment until there is no space left for her children either physically or emotionally. She’s a tragic figure in her faded debutante finery, in contrast to daughter Laura (Pearl Chanda) whose simple attire and understated agony is almost too poignant to bear. The scene between Pearl and her "gentleman caller" Jim (Wilf Scolding) is almost unwatchable, in the best possible sense, laden as it is with both unspoken history and unspeakable hope.
The theatre serves as Tom’s confessional, yet it is Amanda’s well-intentioned dominance that draws the most judgement here. Tom’s predicament is heart-breaking, particularly his plaintive cry that "for sixty-five dollars a month I give up all that I dream of doing and being ever", while Amanda’s "devotion" looks remarkably like suffocation and bears all the hallmarks of the selfishness she attributes to Tom. The audience are certainly left with plenty to discuss.
This is a powerful and absorbing piece which deserves to play to packed houses for the rest of its short run.
The Glass Menagerie runs at the Nuffield, Southampton until 31 October
