Theatre review: The Glass Menagerie

I'm sure the likes of A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof beat it in terms of name recognition, but in my experience The Glass Menagerie is the most frequently-produced Tennessee Williams work; the latest take on it makes five productions I've seen. It was the first Williams play I saw on stage and remains my favourite, although Jeremy Herrin's production seems determined to change that: As lifeless hatchet-jobs on beloved classics go it's not quite on a par with Mark Rylance's energy-sapping Much Ado, but it does share some of that sense of someone just plopping the play onto the stage, and walking away shrugging. In a play whose autobiographical nature is barely disguised, a cramped 1930s St Louis apartment houses what's left of the Wingfield family, scraping by ever since the father abandoned them. Williams' avatar Tom (Tom Glynn-Carney) works in a soul-destroying warehouse job by day, and spends his nights "at the movies."

At home his mother Amanda (Second-best Supporting Actress Amy Adams) tries to supplant his wages by selling magazine subscriptions over the phone, while his older sister Laura (Lizzie Annis) is taking secretarial courses. At least, she's meant to be.

In fact Laura, who was left with difficulties walking after contracting pleurisy as a child and has become incredibly self-conscious and shy as a result, has only been pretending to go. She was so nervous at her first few classes it made her physically sick, so she's ditched them without telling her mother. With this chance at a future a bust, Amanda falls back on the only other option she can think of from her own youth as a popular Southern Belle: She asks Tom to bring back a co-worker as a potential suitor for her daughter.

The Glass Menagerie opens with a speech about its own artificiality, about how its essential truths will be filtered through not only memory but also theatrical conceits and non-literal staging. It's a theme Herrin's production runs with, as Vicki Mortimer's set strips back the stage before cluttering it up again - a central raised platform is dominated by the titular collection of glass animals in a huge display case, and surrounded by tables, chairs, lighting and sound equipment, and most of the cast waiting there when they're not in a scene. There's so much tat around that Adams' costume (designs by Edward K. Gibbon) got caught while she was trying to get back on stage.

What's also highlighted in the opening speech but not reflected at all in this production, is the dreamlike effect Williams is hoping all this artifice will conjure up. The closest thing comes from Ash J Woodward's projections, whose reflections of the menagerie have something of the feel of shadow puppets looming over the play. But the screen they're projected on is far above the action, so you can either look at them or the actors, but not both at once, and they're never able to affect the tone of the story as a result.

Herrin's most obvious change from the text though is to split up the role of Tom: Glynn-Carney only plays him in the 1930s scenes, with a new version of an older Tom (Paul Hilton) on narration duties, looking back at the action through the filter of time. I can see why it might be an interesting experiment, but not all experiments succeed and this one definitely doesn't. Perhaps the point is to increase the question marks over how much of the story is true memory and how much the older Tom is changing and romanticising it; but taking out the element of a single Tom coming in and out of the narrative actually has the opposite effect. It also does no favours to either actor: Hilton mostly wafts around the room like a trapped fart, occasionally creeping around his mother and sister and looking worryingly like he's about to sniff them; and in a role that can be a show-stealer, Glynn-Carney is left with so little to do he barely registers.

Which is almost the case with the star attraction as well - probably not helped by the text cutting a lot of the references to her youth on a plantation, Adams plays Amanda oddly low-key; here she's a woman visibly bowed down by the pressures of her current life, not keeping herself going by half-living in a fantasy that she's still in the old one. There's neither the dangerous charm nor the obnoxiousness, so she never borders on the grotesque - Ian, who hadn't seen the play before, even wondered why Adams would bother crossing the Atlantic to play such a nonentity of a part (it's not the part's fault, which many actresses have been willing to travel as far as needed to play before her.)

Tonight we also witnessed a surprising pitfall of star casting: The audience might come in to see a famous face on stage, but then they might see another famous face in the audience they like better. So for the first act the women sitting next to me were happy to watch Adams, but after realising in the interval that David Harbour was in the audience, the Sheriff from Stranger Things clearly trumped Tara's cunty cousin from an episode of Buffy*, and they barely looked at the stage all second act, instead planning how best to accost Harbour after the show for a selfie†.

Coming out of things best out of the cast are Annis, an actress with cerebral palsy making her professional stage debut (this year's looking like a milestone one for disabled roles going to actors who actually have a disability,) and Victor Alli as Jim, her Gentleman Caller. Without the need for an able-bodied actress to exaggerate a disability, the former reveals Laura as the pretty, charming but frail personality that we can buy Jim genuinely falling for. Alli is also hugely charming and likeable, although he too falls foul of the very earthbound staging: Without the feel of him being hypnotised by a dreamlike setting, his misleading of Laura feels deliberate and cruel. I also didn't like Herrin bringing Alli on at the start of the play to be introduced by Hilton: I know Tom does tell us that the Gentleman Caller will show up eventually, but he has a kind of semi-mythical presence in the play that makes his actual arrival sometimes feel like a jolt, taking the play in a new direction. Showing him from the start loses some of that mystique; at least he isn't then kept onstage to watch the action, like the rest of the cast.

Theatre would be a dead art form if people didn't tinker with the classics, and Herrin's little alterations all feel pretty minor on their own, but something about the way they work together just serves to absolutely flatten the entire evening. I've seen productions of The Glass Menagerie I've loved more than others, but there's usually something to appreciate even in ones that haven't 100% worked. I've never seen one that's left me as cold and disinterested as this one before though. When the glass unicorn broke, a lot of tonight's audience actually laughed. And unless your intention was to entirely subvert what Williams was trying to do, you surely have to see that as a failure.

The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams is booking until the 27th of August at the Duke of York's Theatre.

Running time: 2 hours 25 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Johan Persson.

*leave me alone, I don't have other references for her, I don't watch a lot of films; seeing All The Theatre and All The TV doesn't leave much time for All The Movies as well.

†tonight's performance was also notable for being interrupted when a woman in the Upper Circle suddenly demanded a microphone so she could contribute to the discussion the characters were having on stage, then loudly monologued her thoughts anyway, while Annis and Alli soldiered on. Which is worryingly like the "it's more of a comment than a question" person from post-show Q&As taking things to the next natural step. So yeah, bit of a weird one tonight.