The Glass Menagerie

by Tennessee Williams
presented and performed by Lancaster Footlights
directed by Alan Matthews, assisted by Margaret Samuels
The Grand Theatre, Lancaster
Tuesday 23 – Saturday 27 October 2007

Reviewed by Jane Sunderland

This is the first time I’ve seen this play and I’m very glad I did. It’s an unusual production – not only because the narrator is also a key character, Amanda Wingfield’s son Tom, who tells us from the start that the play “is not realistic”, but also because much of the action takes place behind the curtains in the Wingfield family’s small St. Louis apartment.

And when Amanda’s daughter Laura recalls Jim singing at school, we hear strains of the relevant operetta (and not just as background music). In these very ‘literary’ ways Tennessee Williams (and indeed the directors of this production) remind us that a play is just that – a play, not ‘real’, a form of illusion.

Similarly, the ‘gentleman caller’ (Jim O’Connor), Tom also tells us, is “a symbol”. And there are other, very obvious symbols – the friendless Laura having been called ‘Blue Roses’ by Jim at school, Jim’s breaking of the horn of her treasured glass unicorn’s which Laura accepts happily – for a while. And this production also uses Williams’ originally intended but controversial high screen, on which various images are projected.

All this may be hard to take (certainly I could have done without the screen), but in this production all four actors carry it off well. Erica Nash is superb as Amanda Wingfield, the melodramatic, contriving, but ultimately loving, caring mother, living on her memories and her dreams for her children – a wonderful part but one which is challenging in its psychological complexity, and Nash never allows Amanda to develop into a stereotype.

Her daughter Laura (played sensitively by Katherine Clark) is as unlike her mother as can be – shy, nervous, inward-looking, enthusiastic only about her set of glass animals – although both are living in dream-worlds.

Geoff Finn’s suitably nuanced Tom similarly uses the movies to escape from his mundane existence at home and in the warehouse and in the end leaves home in search of adventure (in the process depriving the family of their main breadwinner, and, symbolically, of electric light, having spent the electricity payment). As Tom-the-narrator tells us at the start of the play: “the huge middle class of America was matriculating in a school for the blind” (the play is set in the 1930s).

The fourth character, ‘gentleman caller’ Jim O’Connor (played convincingly by Paul Slater) in contrast knows where he wants to go, is taking steps to get there – and, we are left in no doubt, will succeed, in contrast to the tragic Wingfields. He is what they have been waiting for, and all is going far better than expected, until … well, go and find out for yourself.

In what might seem a slow-moving performance but one which is simultaneously driven by tension, the audience is drawn into Amanda’s plan and follows it, higher and higher, only to see Amanda and Laura let down with a massive thud, left alone with their memories.

© Jane Sunderland 23/10/07

Tuesday Oct. 23 – Saturday Oct. 27 2007
7.30.p.m. £8/ £7
Special Group Rates. Box office Tel 01524 64695

Useful websites

Study notes

Film version (1987)

About Tennessee Williams