The Glass Menagerie

This is a memory play. It’s what narrator Tom tells us in his prologue and what director John Tiffany accentuates in every element of his crystalline production. The soft light, the smell of must and incense, the gentle score by Nico Muhly: it’s carefully calculated to set the goosebumps prickling. And, yet, still they prickle.

Revived from its New York run in 2013, the Tennessee Williams classic follows a frustrated young writer, his terminally shy sister and their domineering mother. There’s no weak link in the cast, but Cherry Jones as Amanda Wingfield and Kate O’Flynn as daughter Laura leave a lasting impression. 

Jones sings her lines in a Southern drawl, every word a poem. Hidden somewhere behind the facade of the assured matriarch is desperation and regret. Jones shows it to us in the most momentary of glimpses.

Like mother, like daughter: O’Flynn’s performance captures so many subtle shades of Amanda in Laura. She has the same quivering Southern drawl as Jones – but how sad that sounds in a young woman, in a child. She is aged like an old maid way before her time. It’s stunningly pathetic. 

In Bob Crowley’s design the glass menagerie itself, Laura’s collection of glass figurines, surrounds the stage in pools of water – an encroaching obsession, a darkness around this sad, hermetic flat. Instead of walls, the edges of the set are a thick blackness, like the blurred edge of memory. 

There’s poise and precision in every movement. It’s life, choreographed – just like Williams’s text, more heightened than real life, more beautiful. “In memory everything seems to happen to music,” Tom tells us. This is a memory play, held somewhere fraught between peace and melancholy. And just as in a memory, abraded by time and distance, even tragedy seems beautiful.