Theatre reviews: The Glass Menagerie | Cheapo
Tennessee Williams’ 1944 classic The Glass Menagerie gets a memorable 21st-century makeover in Andrew Panton’s new Dundee Rep production, writes Joyce McMillan
The Glass Menagerie, Dundee Rep ★★★★
Cheapo, Oran Mor, Glasgow ★★★★
The 1930s was a time when the US economy imploded and the Hollywood film industry exploded, with huge silver screens in every town offering impossible dreams of glamour, beauty and romance to ordinary Americans often struggling against crushing economic pressures.
This is the world precisely captured in Tennessee Williams’s great 1944 play The Glass Menagerie, which catapulted him to fame as a leading American playwright. Set in St Louis around 1937, it is a semi-autobiographical memory play in which the narrator, Tom Wingfield, is a restless young man working in a shoe warehouse, but alive to the looming crisis of global politics, and dreaming of a new life as a mariner and writer.
He is bound, though, by deep obligations to his single mother Amanda – a faded Southern belle long abandoned by a handsome but faithless husband – and, above all, to his gentle, fragile sister Laura, who suffers from a physical disability, and is desperately shy, preferring to stay at home polishing her beloved collection of little glass animals.
READ MORE: Andrew Panton on directing The Glass Menagerie: 'it's one of the most beautiful plays ever written'
And what is intriguing about Andrew Panton’s new Dundee Rep production – also at the Citizens’ Theatre and the Lyceum this autumn – is how it both meets conventional expectations of this great 20th-century classic, and gently challenges them, with a strong 21st-century sensibility. Emily James’s set avoids the classic neon glow from the dance hall across the alleyway, leaving Tom to describe it from a timeless limbo; Reuben Joseph’s bold score – partly played and sung live by cast remember Declan Spaine – owes as much to the jangling Woody Guthrie radicalism of roving blues and country singers, as to echoes of Irving Berlin.
And if a wonderfully sharp and witty Sara Stewart as Amanda, and an engaging and eloquent Christopher Jordan-Marshall as Tom, represent about as powerful a mother-son pairing as I have seen in any Glass Menagerie, then Amy Conachan as Laura, and Spaine as her gentleman caller Jim, bring whole new dimensions to the story. Conachan glides about in her wheelchair with a combination of vulnerability and dynamism that Laura is rarely allowed, while Spaine’s subtly restless performance points towards a new America, and new struggles to come; in a slightly subdued yet tremendously rich evening bursting with humanity beautifully observed in all its pathos, absurdity and brilliance, failures and dreams, while the great tides of history roll on, carrying us into the unknown.
If history now offers us a long perspective on the troubles of Williams’s America, then the latest Play, Pie Pint lunchtime drama plunges us into a contemporary world of teenage trauma we are barely beginning to understand. Set in an Edinburgh KFC where teenagers gather to play chess, Katy Nixon’s Cheapo – by the winner of last year’s David MacLennan Award – offers a tense dialogue between Testimony Adegbite as Jamie, a clever black kid who suffers constant racist bullying, and Yolanda Mitchell’s Kyla, a pretty classmate who goes out with class “hard man” Ryan.
Kyla has sought out Jamie today, though, because he has witnessed her being gang-raped by Ryan’s friends at a recent house party, and has told the police about it. Kyla – under pressure from Ryan – wants him to withdraw the accusation; Jamie feels he can’t.
The stage is therefore set for a tense, sometimes ugly and finally poignant confrontation, sharply and imaginatively directed by Brian Logan, in which Jamie tries to encourage a bruised and reluctant Kyla to look beyond the cycle of bad-girl notoriety and online humiliation in which she finds herself. This fiercely contemporary drama makes it clear the responsibility is finally ours, to try to offer our young people a better and less desperately stressful life than the one captured by Nixon in this vivid snapshot of a play.
The Glass Menagerie is at Dundee Rep until 18 October; the Citizens’ Theatre, Glasgow, 21-25 October; and the Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, 4-8 November. Cheapo is at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, until 11 October, and the Lemon Tree, Aberdeen, 14-18 October.
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