Poetic and intense, but in need of a pick up in pace
The Glass Menagerie, first performed in 1944, has seen countless reimaginings over the years. This widely-studied classic was the play which launched Tennessee Williams’s successful career as a playwright, earning him global recognition.
The play revolves around a broken Missouri family abandoned by their father (the fifth, unseen character who looms over the story). Amanda Winfield (Geraldine Somerville) has dreams of prosperous futures for her grown-up children. When she learns that her daughter Laura (Natalie Kimmerling) has secretly dropped out of business school she launches herself into finding an appropriate suitor, determined that if she won’t work she must marry. Laura is timid, terribly shy and troubled by her disability, she escapes from reality through her father’s records and her collection of little glass animals. Tom Winfield (Kasper Hilton-Hille) works as a Merchant Mariner. Desperate to escape the situation at home but weighed down by a responsibility to his family and haunted by his father’s actions, he spends his nights at the pictures, avoiding home-life wherever possible. When Tom invites his work-friend Jim (Zacchaeus Kayode) over for dinner, mother endeavours to create the perfect set-up, pinning all of her misguided hope on the long-awaited gentleman caller, certain that he will be the answer to Laura’s future. Crammed into a small St Louis apartment, this play is full of tension, desire and longing, an emotive exploration of strained family relationships.
This play is memory, as we hear from Tom Wingfield in his opening monologue. Williams wrote that The Glass Menagerie should be ‘attempting to find… a more penetrating and vivid expression of things as they are.’ Design by Rosanna Vize lends itself perfectly to this sentiment. Enormous neon lights reading ‘Paradise’ loom, revolving above a sparse stage, bare but for a few chairs and a scattering of tiny glass ornaments. The lighting for the most-part is dream-like, gentle. In the second act vases upon vases of daffodils (or Jonquils, as the American’s call them) surround the stage, interspersed with candles. It’s a beautiful image, a nod to Amanda’s stories of her youth, and a lovely choice for lighting in the later blackout scene. While the characters in the story exist in a cramped apartment, the lack of set and props gives them free-reign to use the full space to express and explore, and gives way for their relationships and needs to really shine through as the driving forces in this story.
The first act of the play relies a little too much on coasting in a dreamlike state. The acting is detailed and energised but the action lacks momentum. Fortunately, this picks up in the second act, particularly spurred on by a fantastic dance sequence (it’s a real spectacle) shared by Laura and Jim in the later part of the play.
Somerville makes a fantastic Amanda. She is determined, seemingly constantly teetering on the edge of breaking point but somehow just managing to keep it together. A mother who puts everything into her children, and though her parenting is clearly flawed, you can see how clearly and wholly she loves them. Kimmerling is magnetic as Laura. Clearly a gifted physical performer, her body exudes anxious energy, which makes her moments of hope all the more heart-wrenching. Hilton-Hille charms as Tom, relatable but filled with need and regret. A lovely contrast to the family of three is Kayode’s Jim – gentle, ambitious, kind, he is a warm presence on the stage, and the hope that he brings the family is contagious.
This production of The Glass Menagerie is ambitious. The sentiment is there, the themes are clear, the dreamlike atmosphere is palpable, but something is missing. Perhaps it’s pace, perhaps it’s something else. That said, it has a lot to offer. This play runs at Alexandra Palace until 1st June.