May 9, 2012
\nAdelaide
\nTheatre<\/p>\n
The Glass Menagerie
\nby Tennessee Williams
\nState Theatre Company
\nThe Playhouse, Adelaide Festival Theatre
\nMay 8. Tickets $ 25 – $ 59
\nBookings : BASS 131 246
\nUntil May 26.<\/p>\n
Tennessee Williams called it \u201cthe saddest play I have ever written\u201d and, first performed in 1944, The Glass Menagerie is certainly his most autobiographical. \u201cThe play is memory\u201d, the narrator, Tom, informs us in the startlingly direct opening address – \u201cBeing a memory play, it is dimly lighted, it is sentimental, it is not realistic.\u201d While this is true in part, Williams\u2019 account, of life with his mother and sister in St Louis in the Depression of the mid 1930s, is never mawkish and carries an emotional authenticity which made it an immediate success and still sustains it now.<\/p>\n
Caught between duty and a restless sense of destiny, Tom Wingfield works in a shoe factory warehouse to support his mother Amanda, an irrepressible Southern belle who, as she herself says, wasn\u2019t prepared for what the future brought. He also has a fragile sister, Laura, who has retreated into an imaginary world represented by her collection of glass figurines. In despair at his lot, Tom escapes \u201cto the movies\u201d, while his mother contrives one last-ditch plan to find a \u201cgentleman caller\u201d to rescue her daughter from impecunious spinsterhood. <\/p>\n
In the final production of his eight year tenure at State Theatre, director Adam Cook has created a Glass Menagerie with all of its theatrical ducks in a row. Victoria Lamb\u2019s clever design, using suspended sections of the tenement d\u00e9cor (as well as providing more literal dining and lounge acting spaces), meets Williams\u2019 own requirement that it be \u201cdim and poetic\u201d while Mark Pennington\u2019s lighting is sympathetic but never sentimental. <\/p>\n
The performances are uniformly excellent. Anthony Gooley, as Tom, is a mordant narrator and an abject character, at times unsparingly churlish as he reflects Williams\u2019 guilty self-portrait of a young man ready to cut and run. The playwright cattily describes Jim, the Gentleman Caller, as \u201ca nice, ordinary young man\u201d and Nic English exactly meets the brief. No wonder Amanda gurgles with delight at the sight of him, and his key scene with Laura which awakens her hopes (and that of the audience ) is a highlight. <\/p>\n
As Laura, Kate Cheel depicts her painful shyness, her fugitive charm and her quiet rebellion. Like her brother, she is an adult over-stayer in the family home. Maybe, nowadays, she\u2019d be an emo.<\/p>\n
It is up to their mother to put a cracker under all this torpor, however misguided her plan, and Deidre Rubenstein\u2019s outstanding performance as Amanda, while capturing the frustrated tiger mother in all her coquettish affectation, also dignifies her heroic effort to turn the tide in the affairs of men. <\/p>\n
Murray Bramwell<\/p>\n
\u201cReturn to the dim rooms where great playwright made his memories\u201d
\nThe Australian, May 10, 2012, p.16.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
May 9, 2012 Adelaide Theatre The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams State Theatre Company The Playhouse, Adelaide Festival Theatre May 8. Tickets $ 25 – $ 59 Bookings : BASS 131 246 Until May 26. Tennessee Williams called it \u201cthe saddest play I have ever written\u201d and, first performed in 1944, The Glass Menagerie is certainly his most autobiographical. \u201cThe play is memory\u201d, the narrator, Tom, informs us in the startlingly direct opening address – \u201cBeing a memory play, it […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23,5,14,13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1800","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-23","category-archive","category-state-theatre-company","category-theatre"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1800","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1800"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1800\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1801,"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1800\/revisions\/1801"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1800"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1800"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1800"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}