In a letter written to his grandfather, reprinted by the Young Vic in its programme for The Glass Menagerie, Tennessee Williams writes that his mother attended the opening night when the play premiered on Broadway in 1944. I can only imagine what she thought on watching this strongly autobiographical story that depicts the mother of Tom, the narrator, as a dominant, forceful, pushy woman who is driving her son away.
In the hands of Deborah Findlay, Amanda Wingfield is an intense force indeed. Her nagging of her son and inability to listen to his needs is so irritating that it put my nerves on edge to watch. Yet she is also, at times, an admirable woman who seems propelled by a vision of the future that only she can see; a dark vision which has her daughter, Laura, languishing in an unhappy spinsterhood. Perhaps the redeeming feature of her dogmatism is that her nagging is actually entirely selfless; her own future is an aside to that of her children.
Laura is a fragile waif of a woman. Suffering from a limp, a nerve-induced stammer and, at times, a seeming propensity to asthmatic breathing, Laura has been thoroughly conquered by the insecurities and lack of self-esteem resulting from these problems and now lives a small, insignificant life, far removed from the world outside the Wingfields’s St Louis home.
To be fair, her mother has already tried to make Laura strive for a career, to no avail. The second option to save her from a lonely future is marriage, but in this too, Laura will make no strides of her own. Pressuring Tom to help save his sister, she asks him to bring home a friend from the factory where he works, a ‘gentleman caller’ like those Amanda had herself in her idealised youth in the South. But the heartbreak that ensues with the arrival of Jim O’Connor will only serve to accentuate Laura’s sad predicament.
The Glass Menagerie is a ‘memory play’, narrated by Tom as though looking back on his past. Joe Hill-Gibbins’s innovative production emphasises this by setting the action in what appears to be a skeleton set. Designer Jeremy Herbert’s iron staircases and railings depict the city-dwelling, cramped nature of the Wingfields’s apartment but also gives it an unfinished feel, as though the scene is a fluctuating memory from Tom’s mind rather than something happening in real time. A heavy red curtain allows us into these memories as it rises and falls on the interior of the flat. Some nice design touches – a No Smoking sign is painted on the fire escape where Tom goes to smoke – add humour and pathos.
Findlay’s portrayal of Amanda – which is funny as well as excruciating, particularly when she plays the ultimate embarrassing mother in front of Jim – is complemented by strong performances from the rest of the cast. Leo Bill, as Tom, captures the fear of a lost future and the petulant nature that his mother brings out in him; Sinéad Matthews gives Laura a sympathetic dignity which makes her crushed hope all the more tragic; and recent RADA graduate Kyle Soller deftly depicts Jim, the gentleman caller who is inadvertently drawn into this family saga. Well-meaning yet clueless, this former high school prom king doesn’t realise what he is doing when he holds Laura and Amanda’s hopes in his hands.
CB