Tennessee Williams’s narrator begins by talking of all of the methods a “reminiscence play” conjures its results: dim lighting, sentimentality, a scarcity of realism. This manufacturing makes use of these artifices and likewise boasts central star casting in Amy Adams, but stops wanting placing us underneath its spell.
Adams’s West Finish debut is stable however unremarkable. She performs Amanda Wingfield, the temperamental matriarch determined to discover a husband for her disabled daughter, Laura (Lizzie Annis) and hold a grip on her son, Tom (Tom Glynn-Carney), whose work at a shoe warehouse leaves him with itchy toes – and a need to be away from this suffocating family in St Louis.
Amanda is puzzlingly cheery and healthful, initially unrecognisable because the pale southern belle from Mississippi who boasts of as soon as having drawn 17 suitors in a single day.
Beneath the path of Jeremy Herrin, the primary half feels flat-footed and with out Williams’s heady mixture of craving, ardour and despair. Paul Hilton, because the narrator, performs the older Tom wanting again, and is an enlivening pressure, even when he prowls across the stage with out sufficient to do. The actors on the entire ship their strains effectively sufficient however the emotional centre is simply not there. Annis’s Laura looks like a marginal character and Glynn-Carney’s Tom is fiery however for ever marching off stage in anger.
The play is pervaded by a way of abandonment – first that of the absent father who has walked out on the Wingfield brood after which Tom’s personal flight on the finish. However we don't really feel the emotional weight of the latter’s resolution to go away. Nor can we choose up on tenderness between siblings. There's higher synergy within the mother-daughter relationship as Amanda warns Laura of the restricted choices for single ladies and urges her to hunt recourse in wedlock.
One of many largest issues is the dimensions of the stage, which appears huge and works in opposition to the intimacy of this story, leaving it feeling unfairly slight. Vicki Mortimer’s set is stripped of phantasm and has its innards uncovered, from the sound system to the spotlights. That is consistent with the drama’s meta-theatricality however renders the stage too starkly bare. The glass menagerie itself is housed ina museum-sized glass vitrine and appears extra like considered one of Damien Hirst’s stylish pharmacy cupboards than the gathering of dinky glass animals in Williams’s textual content.
Neither do the enormous back-screen projections work (video design by Ash J Woodward). They provide visible accompaniments – a tender focus typewriter seems in a scene about Laura’s enterprise faculty typing course; a crescent moon picture is magnified when a sliver of moon is talked about and the face of Amanda’s absconded husband emerges when the script speaks of his smiling photograph – however this signposting seems corny and over-literal.
Apparently, the place in Williams’s unique script Amanda speaks nostalgically of servants and plantation males within the segregated deep south of her youth, all however one such reference has been excised. The looks of the “gentleman caller”, Jim O’Connor, brings a extra emotionally engaged second half. He's performed compellingly by Victor Alli.
The play lastly settles into intimacy as Jim casts his spell over Laura, whose personal character comes alive. An electrical energy blackout results in candlelit romance (lovely lighting design by Paule Constable) and we're left feeling Laura’s dismay when the dream of a life with Jim past these 4 partitions ebbs away. However for a play with such an enormous, beating coronary heart, this doesn't lower deeply sufficient in a manufacturing that appears severely undercharged.
The Glass Menagerie is at Duke of York’s theatre, London, till 27 August.
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