The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williamsat the ADC Theatre, Cambridge

The Easter break brings with it the opportunity to see Tennessee Williams’ highly autobiographical play The Glass Menagerie at Cambridge’s ADC Theatre. Director James Dowson serves up a superb, polished production which, by incorporating elements that bring home the idea that this is a ‘memory play’, remains faithful to Williams’ original production plans.

At the start of the play, narrator and main character Tom Wingfield – representing Williams himself – introduces us to his mother Amanda and his sister Laura, and the modest apartment in St. Louis, Missouri in which they live. We learn early on that Tom’s father walked out on the family, sending only the shortest of notes as a crumb of comfort: ‘Hello. Goodbye!’ A portrait of this absent father (Williams’ own father was largely an absent one, drinking heavily and behaving like a tyrant) still hangs in the living room, though, and Laura constantly plays the phonograph records that he left behind. Tom is minded at times to follow in his father’s footsteps and get away, ‘as far as the system of transportation reaches!’ Thanks in part to the excellent set design – the gloomy colour of the leather couch, the austere fire escape planted directly on the stage – and in part to the pitch-perfect acting of Lynne Livingstone as Amanda and Asher Guy as Laura, we start to understand why Tom feels so oppressed in the apartment. Laura does little more than while away time tending to her collection of glass animals, and Amanda is overbearing, monitoring Tom’s eating obsessively and demanding that he ‘Rise and shine!’ each morning. ‘I’ll rise, but I won’t shine,’ Tom says acerbically: he is unable to shine in his home environment, or in his humdrum job at a warehouse. Tim Drummond is very impressive as the baggy-trousered Tom, his delivery reminiscent of a forties noir radio-play. He admirably pulls off the feat of making Tom by turns charming and hard to like, and is the picture of restlessness.

In his programme notes, the play’s director reminds us that we are only seeing the other family members as Tom remembers them, so we ought to cut them some slack. Lynne Livingstone certainly brings out Amanda’s anxieties very well, as she frets over Laura’s lack of ‘gentleman callers’ and Tom’s late-night trips to the movies. Livingstone also shows us the ‘vivacity’ for which Amanda claims to have been known in her younger years, and brings a liveliness to the character, one that is reinforced by Amanda’s inventive language: ‘You’re eloquent as an oyster.’ Her giddy excitement and flirtatiousness (that dress!) when a potential suitor for Laura finally arrives, in the shape of Jim O’Connor, is delightfully well-judged. So, too, is Jim’s response: Christian Bailey does an excellent job of being both bewildered and amused by Amanda’s behaviour. Asher Guy is extremely convincing as Laura, painfully shy and mortified by the prospect of sitting down for dinner with a man she had idolized at high school. When the two are left alone, a touching scene plays out, but Laura’s hopes are as fragile and prone to being dashed to pieces as the glass figurines she so cherishes. There is a powerful metaphor in the play for the tragic fate that lay in store for Tennessee Williams’ own sister, Rose, after she was diagnosed as being mentally ill.

Set at a time of great uncertainty and violence in world events, coupled with a fear of what the future would bring, the play will resonate with audiences today. Though the heavy theme of ‘everlasting regret’ is explicitly mentioned in it and brought to the fore, the play nonetheless makes us laugh and appreciate life’s lighter side – quite some accomplishment on the part of Williams and everyone involved in this production.