By Becky May, Volunteer Woman Reporter for Bristol Women’s Voice
The prevailing theme of this classic play is disappointment but director Atri Banerjee’s take on it is anything but disappointing.
An exploration
With strong performances from the small cast throughout, it is a thought provoking piece and though it premiered in 1944 and is set just shortly before that, it is striking how relevant the themes in this classic play, still seem today. It is a not so much a tale as an exploration of the dynamics and tensions which exist within one American (single parent) family, and of the difficulties of parenting in troubled times and in in the face of societal pressures to conform, especially where children deviate from the norm. It speaks to our hopes and ambitions as parents and to the complicated feelings we experience when we see our children struggling.
A memory play
The Glass Menagerie is a ‘memory’ play, that is a play narrated by main character, Tom, who gives his recollections of his family and the events which unfold over the couple of days before he left for good to find adventure in the world. The family in question consists of his faded Southern Belle mother, Amanda (Geraldine Somerville), sister Laura (Natalie Kimmerling) and Tom Wingfield himself (Kasper Hilton-Hille).
The father has long since abandoned the family having ‘fallen in love with long distance’ in his job in telecommunications. Amanda is played as a desperately caring though overly anxious mother who longs for her children to succeed and conform. In this portrayal it is easy to empathise with her Mrs Bennett-like attempts to encourage ‘gentleman callers’ to her school refuser daughter Laura, who suffers from a small physical disability as well as being incredibly shy (perhaps in today’s world we would understand that Laura is neuro divergent or suffering from social anxiety, avoiding social contact and instead obsessively playing with her large collection of glass animals), and her desperate pleadings to her son to settle down to his humdrum job and desist from his guerilla poetry and nightly escapist outings to the movies.
Laura wears headphones evoking her isolation from others, and is perhaps a deliberate reference to the headphones which people with ASD often use now to dampen down over-stimulation. The dayglow netting dress she wears to dinner is more like a child’s fancy dress item than something to be worn socially, making her appear more vulnerable child than the adult woman she now is.
Between hopes and reality
Director Atri Banerjee has given the play a spare minimalist treatment: the set is a revolving disk surrounded by the glass ornaments which give it its name, and in turn candles, with a giant revolving sign in the centre with the word ‘Paradise’ spelled out in faded pastel neon letters. The sign is for a nightclub opposite the Wingfield’s family home but given the subject matter of the piece, it serves as an ironic reminder of the gap between our hopes for life and the reality. The costumes are modern apart from Amanda’s dress which harks back to a bygone era when she was in her prime, partying all day and all night and entertaining gentlemen callers by the dozen. This modern trend for minimalism in the scenery and costume usually leaves me feeling a little cheated but it does work here given the cognitive nature of the material.
Everyone is disappointed
After a great deal of pressure from his mother Tom brings a male colleague (gentleman caller) home for dinner and this turns out to be Jim O’Connor, a former school mate of Laura who was everything she was not there; a confident sporting hero who excelled at everything. He too has been disappointed, failing to live up to his early promise and now stuck in a dead end job. Amanda has high hopes for the encounter which are all too obvious and is blind to the unlikelihood of his providing a match for Laura.
However, during the course of the evening there is a power cut facilitating a private talk between Jim and Laura in the candlelight where he gives her some life lessons, advising her that her difference is nothing to be ashamed of and calling for her to have more confidence and hope. Everyone is disappointed he says, as is he, but that he is not discouraged. They dance, a scene accompanied by very loud modern music with echos of ‘Dirty Dancing’ which seemed slightly surreal. Inevitably though disappointment follows and Amanda blames Tom, railing against him to the extent that he is finally driven away from home, to a faraway place. It is from here that he narrates the play as he looks in a shop wind full of coloured glass and as he imagines his sister touching his shoulders, the candles are blown out on the set.
Tom has managed to escape from the narrow confines of his existence, as his father did before him, but for the women in his family, it is not so easy. Plus ca change!
The play was showing at Bristol Old Vic on Saturday 11 May 2024.
