The Glass Menagerie: ‘intelligent as it is adventurous’

In an “illuminating” essay in the programme for this terrific staging of Tennessee Williams’s semi-autobiographical memory play, Rosanna Vize explains that when the production was postponed during the pandemic, she completely overhauled her design. A sign for the Paradise dance hall, originally tiny, now dominates an almost bare stage.

“Its huge neon letters hang over the action, slowly revolving, as if to taunt” the unhappy Wingfield household below. The effect is “tremendous, ironic, melancholic”, said Susannah Clapp in The Observer.

The sign glows or dims, spins faster or slower, according to the momentum of the play, said Mark Fisher in The Guardian. Typical of a production that is “as intelligent as it is adventurous”, this boldness lets us see Williams’s “tale of thwarted desire afresh”.

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Some will find the Paradise symbolism a touch heavy-handed, said Matt Barton on What’s on Stage – but Atri Banerjee’s production has real beauty. The staging deftly avoids a realistic presentation of Laura Wingfield’s collection of glass figurines: instead, we see reflections in the glossy sheen of the polished floor, glinting like the surface of a millpond. Lee Curran’s lighting also peppers the set with reflected spots of light “like a flickering constellation” – creating a “visual sense of dreams, fantasy and their wistful references to the Moon and outer space”.

“There is a simple litmus test for the success of a Menagerie production: whether or not it leaves the audience in pieces,” said Claire Allfree in The Daily Telegraph. By that measure, this “powerfully heart-wrenching” evening is a triumph, in which “detailed expressionism” never obscures “vividly human” performances from a fine cast. Geraldine Somerville excels as Amanda, the “trilling, overbearing matriarchal fantasist”, and Joshua James “finds all the play’s savage humour” as Tom (who tells the story, based on Williams’s own memories). We get a Chekhovian sense of these characters as real and “adrift”. Yet the production also “captures the play’s curious ineffable quality, halfway between memory, dream and something entirely imagined”.

Royal Exchange, Manchester. Until 8 October