The Glass Menagerie

by Tennessee Williams

seen at the Duke of York's Theatre on 15 April 2017

John Tiffany directs Cherry Jones as Amanda, Kate O'Flynn as Laura, Michael Esper as Tom and Brian J Smith as Jim in this excellent revival of Tennessee Williams's 'memory play'.

As the play is narrated by Tom, an aspiring poet (who may be seen as a stand-in for the author) we may expect it to be about his own struggle to escape the suffocating atmosphere of his family, and in particular of his over-bearing mother Amanda. She indeed manages the faded hopes of her life by keeping up appearances and talking, talking, talking in a way that would infuriate any young man with any strength of character. Cherry Jones portrays this difficult and at times infuriating woman with immense authority and dignity, which makes her power all the more pervasive, while Michael Esper as Tom shows us something of the strain of living up to such a mother's standards.


But the play also hinges on an excruciating episode with Tom's sister Laura, whose pathological shyness is yet another claim on Toms family loyalty. Laura, afflicted with a slightly deformed leg, has magnified the disability in her mind and as a result is an almost total recluse. Her mother's attempts to deal with this situation are fundamentally well-meaning but hardly helpful. Any overt reference to abnormality, whether physical or social, is absolutely banned, and in the meantime she enthuses about 'gentleman callers', fondly remembering her own youth in the South where she was (she claims) the object of much attention. It never seems to cross her mind that her constant boasting amounts to self-glorification and presents Laura with a crushing role model which she has no hope of emulating.

Finally Tom bows to his mother's pressure and invites a work colleague for dinner; Amanda pulls out all the stops she can in their straitened circumstances leaving Jim, an excellently diffident Brian J Smith, somewhat bewildered. But he treats Laura with an engaging sympathy, and there seems to be a chance that with his encouragement she might gain some self-confidence. However he suddenly reveals that he is not actually a free man; Amanda is blazingly furious with her son, assuming that he must have known that Jim was already spoken for, and Tom finally leaves the home forever.

Kate O'Flynn gives an astonishing performance as Laura, sulky and wilful in attempting to avoid all her mother's plans - even to the extent of trying to refuse to open the door to Tom and Jim - and yet ultimately unable to assert herself. She speaks very often in monosyllables and with an unusually quiet voice, which makes here yeses and noes sound almost like yelps of pain. I thought at first that I would have great difficulty hearing her at all, but in fact she commanded attention and the audience was unusually silent, hanging on every word. As for the physical disability, it was hardly noticeable, which is perhaps the point (apparently the stage directions describing her endorse this). Certainly it was entirely credible that Jim should remark that she had brooded on the fact far too much for her own good (it turns out that they had known each other in high school). Her amazed blossoming under Jim's regard, and devastation when he admits that he is already engaged, were wonderfully and painfully portrayed.

The play is set in the down-at-heels apartment in which the family lives. In this production, this was hinted at with furniture and some hangings, but without walls, so that the scene was indeed more like a memory, the salient objects present but the rest shrouded in inky blackness. Though it was not possible to see directly from the stalls, the two main acting areas were in fact surrounded by pools of water, which in certain lights reflected ripples upwards. Occasionally the characters jerked or moved to new positions absently, as if Tom were jogging his memory; this was all highly effective in emphasising that we are watching his recollection, highly coloured perhaps by his guilt at abandoning Laura in order to escape Amanda, rather than a straight representation of what 'actually' happened.