Reviews

Tennessee Williams described Amanda, the Southern matriarch played by Honor Blackman in this new production of The Glass Menagerie, as “a little woman of great but confused vitality clinging frantically to another time and place”. His brother saw her more as their own mother incarnate. Almost all of Williams’s plays take their cue from the world of his childhood, that claustrophobic world of self- beguiling Southern gentility and self-destructive emotional intensity. But this early masterpiece has the peculiarly painful intimacy of a family portrait.

The play is set in a cramped apartment in St Louis, Missouri, the city to which the Williams family moved in 1918. The absent figure of an alcoholic husband hangs humiliatingly over Amanda, as from time to time it hung over Williams’s own mother. Amanda’s daughter Laura is agonisingly shy, disablingly sensitive to her slight limp; Williams’s sister Rose became so nervy and withdrawn that she was subjected to a disastrous lobotomy. The “gentleman caller” whom Amanda hoists upon a terrified Laura had his real-life model. And the narrator Tom - Williams’s real first name - is a frustrated poet who, like Williams, is sent to work in a shoe warehouse.

It all adds an irresistible autobiographical edge. But whatever her basis in fact, Amanda is an extraordinarily complex and compelling creation. You can feel intense pity for her: an ageing, abandoned temptress clinging to the last threadbare vestiges of gracious living.

You can concede that she has no idea of the damage the unknown visitor might inflict on her delicate daughter. At the very least you can excuse her determination to bring another breadwinner into the family.

Or you can revile her as a domestic despot who jealously flaps around Tom whenever he picks up a pen; an emotional tyrant who courts the caller to recapture her own lost youth. Though she errs more on the side of the blithely obstinate than the flamboyantly ferocious, Honor Blackman’s quietly commanding performance finds all these notes. Her bossy harangues give way to little high-pitched flutters of flirtation; her rich tones (though she lost her voice at the end) ring out in telling contrast to a thin and reedy Laura.

Helen Grace’s Laura is impressive, too; as brittle as the glass animals she obsessively collects, her brief, awkward awakening in the second half is finely controlled. That marvellous scene is also well played by Douglas Cockle, as the caller whose good intentions amount to another failure of understanding. Keith Merrill is fine as Tom, though his accent is eclectic.

All in all, a good stab at the play’s fractured heart. And yet I kept feeling there was something missing: too much listlessness, perhaps; not enough enervated intensity. Christopher Madin’s brooding, melancholy score helps, but the constant lighting changes are intrusive. I was not altogether convinced, either, by the revolving set. It allows the director, Damian Cruden, to foreground his characters literally in quick rotation, which he does seamlessly and sensitively. But it loses that all-important element of claustrophobia.

This winter, York’s Theatre Royal has developed an appetite for staging classic plays with celebrity actresses of a certain age.
Last month, they served up Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard with Miriam Margoyles. And now comes a production of Tennessee Williams’s pained, autobiographical memory play, The Glass Menagerie, directed by Damian Cruden.
Honor Blackman stars as Amanda Wingfield, the nagging mother of the young writer-hero, Tom. Blackman plays the aged Southern belle credibly. Her American drawl is convincing, and she generates moments of amusingly naturalistic intimacy with Keith Merrill’s Tom, shoving his feet off the old chaise-longue to sit beside him and fuss about finding a suitor for his shy sister, Laura.
Rather than portraying the mother-figure as a nightmarishly interfering woman who harps on obsessively about her former beaux, Blackman makes her a sympathetic figure - a constantly anxious single parent and dreamy old romantic. This could be right. Tom, as the retrospective narrator, hints that the domestic scene from which he has escaped has become tinged with nostalgia.
But Blackman pushes her flattering portrait just too far. Always elegant, she is not manic enough to drive Tom up the wall or to reduce his fragile sibling to a nervous wreck.
Helen Grace’s Laura could be both dreamier and more tense, but she has a sweetly cowed air, her long limbs curled inwards. Douglas Cockle, as the gentleman caller who is drawn to her, nicely combines bluffness and quieter responsiveness, though he doesn’t oscillate ambiguously enough between sexual attraction and mere chumminess to sharpen her tragedy.
Merrill, meanwhile, hardly seems concerned about his sister. Yet his mix of infuriation and fondness for his mother is rich, and his riveting eloquence and witty bitchiness makes this Tom seem the real embodiment of the playwright.
The cello accompaniment, played on stage by composer Christopher Madin, can muddy the dialogue, but is atmospherically mournful. And Liam Doona’s revolving set may make you wonder if the Wingfields have shacked up on a merry-go-round, but its translucent gauze walls beautifully suggest that Tom’s memory is haunted by ghosts.

In Tennessee Williams’s production notes for The Glass Menagerie, he offers a description of the “grim” environs of the Wingfields’ St Louis apartment. The visual details are vital: the status of Amanda Wingfield, once a Southern belle who received 17 “gentlemen callers” in a day, has declined. Her husband drank, then he deserted her. She’s left with a surly son (Keith Merrill, with dodgy drawl), a fragile daughter Laura (a delicate, hunched-up Helen Grace) and a demeaning job. Yet in Damian Cruden’s production, the circular set is surrounded by a wooden walkway which is more like a plush harbour jetty than an urban fire escape; and as the actors pace between giddily revolving rooms, the claustrophobic despair of Williams’s semi-autobiographical memory play is dissipated.

Honor Blackman’s steely gentility conveys the unrealistic aspirations that insidiously damage Amanda’s children. And when the longed-for gentleman caller arrives for Laura, Blackman’s flirtatious chortles cascade over her daughter’s discomfort. Crucially, however, Cruden handles the pivotal scene between Laura and Douglas Cockle’s ebullient Jim with measured sensitivity.