The Glass Menagerie

Synopsis

Amanda Wingfield was once courted by seventeen gentleman callers in on afternoon. Now she yearns for the days when her daughter Laura will captivate the world. But Laura lives out her own dreams with her cherished collection of glass animals - until the man she has loved from afar arrives at the apartment. The Glass Menagerie is a poignant and intensely moving exploration of a fragile fantasy world - a world that might easily be shattered.

Our Review:

14 February 2007

As a domestic, poetic drama with a powerful emotional lyricism it is hard to beat Tennessee Williams’s first great success, The Glass Menagerie. In a small family apartment in a tenement building down an alley in St Louis, Tom Wingfield presents a memory play of his own departure and the night a Gentleman Caller visited his shy and crippled sister.

Tom, of course, represents Williams himself, and Laura the playwright’s own sister, Rose, the true love of his life. Their mother, Amanda, is one of the great roles of modern American drama, a fussing, repressive, ecstatically nostalgic Southern lady living on past dreams of gentility and romance while suffocating her own children with expectation.

Jessica Lange repeats the touching, fragile performance as Amanda she gave in New York two years ago. She is just as absurdly girlish, but I sense a new element of creeping insanity. Amanda is one of those mothers who want to reinvent their lives in their child...

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Latest User Review

Job - 12 April 2007:

I have to agree with all the praise. This is so good it ought to be the toast of the town. Part of the problem's got to be poor advance publicity and a poster that trades on the un-box-office name of Jessica Lange as though it's ever going to put bums on seats. She's a fine actress, but a pull-'em-in star? I think not. The poster's the only wrong-headed thing about this production: it betrays Tennessee Williams (they do all but splash it with 'Jessica "Tootsie" Lange', à la 'Frazer "Emmerdale" Hines' of naff regional tours) and it doesn't have a hope of drawing in any punters who aren't already familiar with the play. Amanda Hale as Laura was magnificent. The best new talent I've seen since Kelly Reilly in Three Sisters. In fact all four actors were class acts, although their voices did not carry well across the Apollo. I was only in Row M, and my hearing is 20/20ish, but I strained to catch the dialogue at times, and I shouldn't have had to do that. (This show feels as though it directed for a smaller space than a prosc arch west end house; I'd love to have seen it at the Donmar.) After the interval I moved forward a few rows and matters improved a tad, but it still wasn't perfect - and for such a long, wordy show this was a drawback. But everything else was outstanding, and Rupert Goold caught the dream-like quality of the play better than any other version I've seen. Bravo....

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