Theatreguide.London
www.theatreguide.london
The Theatreguide.London Review
The Glass Menagerie
Young Vic Theatre Winter 2010-2011
Tennessee
Williams' first success is one of the most beautifully poetic and
sweetly sad dramas in the American repertoire, and much of its power
comes through in this Young Vic revival, despite a production that
sometimes seems perversely determined to sabotage it.
In 1930s St. Louis an ageing former Southern belle tries to keep her
family together in some semblance of graciousness despite her adult
son's resentment of his menial job and desire to escape, and her adult
daughter's crippling shyness and inability to cope.
Mother asks son to find a boyfriend - a Gentleman Caller - for his
sister, and the friend from work he brings to dinner proves indeed one
of Nature's instinctive gentlemen, but unable to fill the role he has
been cast in. Son goes off to have a life, forever haunted by the guilt
of deserting those he left behind.
The first hint that director Joe Hill-Gibbins doesn't quite get this
play comes as Leo Bill as Tom delivers the evocative opening monologue
and doesn't even make a token attempt at a Southern accent.
Deborah
Findlay as mother Amanda does manage a non-specific Southern sound, but
Sinead Matthews acts and sounds more New York Jewish than Southern.
There is never any sense of family here, and you feel that not only have
these three characters never met each other before, but they've never
come within 2000 miles of each other.
Following the pattern of Bill's opening monologue, which is meant to
lure us gently into the dream world of the play, all three actors race
madly through dialogue that wants to be savoured in the mouth and ear,
playing as if this were Clifford Odets or even David Mamet rather than
Williams.
Meanwhile, in a play about a physically crippled girl, director
Hill-Gibbins and designer Jeremy Herbert have built a multi-level stage
that serves no logical or dramatic function other than to make the poor
actress limp up and down constantly.
And on a
thrust stage, with the audience all around, the director too often
plants actors in one spot with their backs to too many people or a piece
of furniture between them and the viewers.
Still, Tennessee Williams is too great a writer to be defeated by
directorial errors like this, and the playwright gradually wrestles the
play back from the director.
Deborah Findlay nicely and sympathetically captures Amanda's frantic
end-of-her-tether quality, her 'jonquils' aria is as beautiful and
absurd as the playwright could wish, and the scenes in which she
half-flirts with her daughter's ostensible date capture exactly the
right balance of the grotesque and the glimpse of the gracious beauty
Amanda must have been in her youth.
The Gentleman Caller scene, in which the guest's inherent kindness draws
Laura out of her shell and lets us briefly hope for a happy ending, is
one of the most perfectly written scenes in all of world drama. I have
never seen it fail, and it works all its magic here, despite some clumsy
staging.
Kyle Soller briefly steals the play as every Gentleman Caller before him
has, letting us see and love a callow and somewhat foolish young man who
is far more sensitive and generous than even he realises.
And by the time we reach Tom's closing monologue, even more poetic and
evocative than the opening, not even Leo Bill's incongruous accent and
delivery can break the spell of the playwright's words.
Every production of The Glass Menagerie I have ever seen was better than
this one. But the play is just too good, and ultimately too
indestructible, to miss.
Gerald Berkowitz
|
Receive
alerts
every time we post a new review
|