The Glass Menagerie at the Yard Theatre – review

So farewell then to the Yard Theatre. After 14 years of creative endeavour, this ramshackle, atmospheric, former warehouse in east London is about to close – to return in a year, reconfigured, larger, and hopefully with more sanitary loos.

It aims, however, to preserve its rough magic as it is demolished and transformed into a new 220-seat auditorium, designed by architects Takero Shimazaki, using as much reclaimed and recycled material as possible.

Given its radical reputation and its role in nurturing new talent, a revival of Tennessee Williams’ perennial favourite The Glass Menagerie seems an odd farewell play. Yet, as director Jay Miller points out in the programme, it is a play about “what we remember and how we remember it and whether we can ever leave our memories behind.” In that context of holding on and letting go, it is suddenly the perfect choice.

Miller gives it a fiercely anti-naturalistic production that suits the aesthetic of his theatre. In Cécile Trémolières’s design, a pile of muddy dust full of discarded objects builds up behind the battered sofa of the Wingfield apartment where, in pre-Second World War St Louis, young Tom dreams of adventure, of leaving behind his indomitable mother Amanda (Sharon Small) and frail sister Laura (Eva Wingfield).

The past literally dominates the space, in the form of a wall-sized mural of the family’s absent father and a soundtrack (by Josh Anio Grigg), full not only of fragments of old songs but of echoing conversations, thoughts that chase round in circles. But so does the hope of a future, represented in the frail figure of the ‘gentleman caller’, suave in a yellow suit, the man Amanda hopes might have some interest in marrying her daughter.

The costumes, by Lambdog1066, are an unwieldly mix of old and new, making the protagonists seem like timeless battlers through a smoky existence, survivors of the apocalypse as well as early 20th-century strugglers. Sarah Readman’s lighting evokes emotion and mood, at once full of warmth and then plunging into gray, semi-darkness.

This stylised approach has the benefit of liberating the play from its slightly genteel expectations. Tom Varey’s angry Tom, prowling the perimeters of the space, his head torch sometimes lighting the action, becomes the archetype of all wannabe writers, ruthless in his pursuit of his needs even while acknowledging the sacrifice his family will make on his behalf.

Small’s sharp, clever Amanda is less Southern belle and more a coquettish warrior, fighting for her family the only way she knows how, falling asleep exhausted in a cupboard as she sells periodical subscriptions to make ends meet. She’s a realist, opposing the dreamy nature of both her children, conscious of time racing at her heels. “The future becomes the present, the present the past and the past an everlasting regret,” she says, and Small endows the words with a tolling resonance.

The disadvantage of the alienation of Miller’s approach, however, is that as the play unfolds, the ties between the family disintegrate. Miller strips back the relationships between the characters to place them in spotlight isolation. Amanda and Tom shift to the sidelines, and their reactions don’t register.

This leaves the great weight of the play and the main thrust of the production on the astonishing scene between Laura, whose shyness is an agony that cuts her off from the world and Jim, the gentleman caller whose easy charm has not made his life any less of a disappointment. Played in candlelight, it is a wonder as Eva Morgan and Jad Sayegh (both making their professional theatre debuts) turn it into a taut dance of disappointment, letting its hope register before it fades into sadness.

Both give beautifully modulated performances, Morgan’s tiny, fluttering hands and tight facial expressions conveying all Laura’s agony, and Sayegh letting his early smugness change into real kindness as he realises the misapprehension under which they are both forced to labour. As her dream is dashed on the harsh rocks of truth, the play’s suppressed emotions burst into life.