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A classic look at pain of rejection
GLASS MENAGERIE
Apollo theatre
IT was that most urbane of American writers and political patrician Gore Vidal who claimed that the arrival of the ballet and Tennessee Williams’s Glass Menagerie vitalised the theatre in New York in the post-war year of 1945.
Set in the home of the Wingfield family in St Louis – it was in truth Williams’s own family – the play startled sophisticated theatre-goers by it’s poetic language, dramatic flexibility, theme and tragic resolution.
Amanda (Jessica Lang) clings to the memories and manners of a vanishing age associated with the Old South.
In gentile poverty she and her ‘cripple’ daughter Laura (Amanda Hayell) depend upon the £65 a week that her son Tom (Ed Stoppard) earns in the shoe factory.
Mr Wingfield has fled to Mexico. Amanda wearily jokes that he was a “telephone man who fell in love with long distance”.
Laura collects glass animals and stumbles about the apartment. But her mother, mindful of her difficult future, hopes that Tom can arrange a gentlemen caller to woo and possibly wed Laura – a husband to provide and care for her.
She is a lonely but lovely girl. In real life, Tom, Williams himself, yearned to leave this claustrophobic atmosphere. He loves his sister but escapes every evening to the ‘movies’, or so he claims.
At times he narrates the story. A bold device and very successful in Stoppard’s hands.
He brings home a workmate for dinner, whom mother Wingfield sees as a solution to her own and Laura’s future.
In a sensitive second part when visitor and daughter are left alone – they demonstrate after a brief period their deep affection for each other. But he has to tell her very directly that he is engaged to be married.
Amanda Hayell, a young actress, here doomed to collecting more glass animals and deepening isolation registers the unspoken anguish of rejection and hopelessness. A superb and disturbing performance.
While her scheming mother realises that there might never be another gentleman caller. At the end they cling to each other in desperation.
Rupert Goulds handles this quartet with aplomb. It is a compulsive piece of theatre. Little wonder that after this rapturous reception in New York, the great ladies of Hollywood fought to play the part in the film.
Until May 22
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