THE GLASS MENAGERIE To 14 November.

Wales.

THE GLASS MENAGERIE
by Tennessee Williams.

Clwyd Theatre Cymru Tour to 14 November 2009.
Runs 2hr 15min One interval.
Review: Timothy Ramsden 9 October at Emlyn Williams Theatre, Mold.

Prosaic rather than poetic.
Last Spring director Kate Wasserberg, upgrading from the tiny Finborough Theatre in Earl’s Court, where she had provided several successful productions, made an auspicious Mold debut with Finborough writer James Graham’s A History of Falling Things. Like that play, her Finborough successes were dramas set in a real world.

Tennessee Williams’ Glass Menagerie, however, is a memory play. Tom Wingfield is an adult in the present-day where he addresses us directly, but he’s recalling his later teens and the home from which he escaped some years before. What’s missing in this production is any sense of memory. The enlarged photo of the family’s absent father seems more suitable for a hoarding rather than a living-room, while Mark Bailey’s awkward setting, with its door angled away from the main set, presents the Wingfields’ poverty without invoking any sense of the play’s style.

Nor is there much sense of Amanda, the mother in denial about herself and her daughter, as a woman stranded in this life, living-off her memories of her earlier days as a self-proclaimed southern belle. At least Teresa Banham has the skill and experience to make Amanda credible. It was noticeable that the laugh she provoked on one of the play’s few humorous lines, (about the absentee father as a telephone engineer who fell in love with long-distances) had evoked no response when first heard from Hywel John’s Tom.

That’s because John chops-up the line with an over-conscious manner that puts individual phrases ahead of the shape of sentences. Most un-memory like, at least for this play, it’s something to which Wasserberg ought to have attended.

Certainly the final, sustained section plays well-enough. There again, it’s near-indestructible, which isn’t to take away from the adequacy of Sam Massey’s Gentleman Caller and the Laura of Lisa Diveney, who captures the character’s withdrawal and fear throughout the play and her longing in this scene.

Her childhood pleurosis had been misheard as “blue roses” and, wouldn’t you know, projections of such flowers kept appearing. When externals abound, it’s often a sign the core of a piece has been missed. That’s so here.

Tom: Hywel John.
Amanda: Teresa Banham.
Laura: Lisa Diveney.
Jim: Sam Massey.

Director: Kaye Wasserberrg.
Designer: Mark Bailey.
Lighting: Tom White.
Sound: Kevin Heyes.
Composer: Colin Towns.
Choreographer: Rachel Catherall.
Dialect coach: Sally Hague.

2009-10-18 21:34:36