The Glass Menagerie review: Tennessee Williams's breakout play with a little too much polish

The Wingfield family of The Glass Menagerie are all left behind, in some respect, by the world. Photo: Ste Murray 

Gate Theatre, Dublin
★ ★ 

For any director prone to visual flare, Tennessee Williams’s breakout play has something to work with. “It is dimly lighted, it is sentimental,” explains its narrator Tom Wingfield (Marty Rea) at the beginning, in that famous description of a memory play. “It is not realistic”.

That the Gate Theatre had given it to director-designer Tom Cairns, whose recent work is marked by spectacle, could make you expect something new from Williams’s play. The details of human recollection melting, perhaps, like a Salvador Dali watch. While the result is attractive, it is ultimately inert. Too much polish for The Glass Menagerie.

When Tom summons his Depression era Missouri home, it is seen splintered through translucent scrims, against an auroral void. The effect would be more surreal if Cairns didn’t project lines from the script in nostalgic handwriting, confirming the production more as a period piece.  

Here, pining music arrives for Tom’s mother Amanda (Samantha Bond), long deserted by her husband, as she recalls gentleman callers from yesteryear and Southern belles fading without careers and marriages. On paper, those feelings of abandonment seem destructive, compelling Amanda to recapture something lost by controlling her children’s lives. In Bond’s performance she is less overbearing and more unbalanced, like Blanche DuBois. 

That leaves you wondering why her children are so desperate for escape. Tom, a worker wasting away in a shoe warehouse, often disappears into late night drinking binges. Laura (Zara Devlin), a young woman with pleurisy, retreats from her schooling and into the details of her glass collection. On second thought, the claustrophobia of a more realist production seems like a good idea.

When Amanda arranges a gentleman caller for Laura (the well-measured Frank Blake), it’s clear that the production belongs to its youth. Too agonised to answer the door, Devlin’s Laura begs “I’m sick,” as if wracked with shame. 

From there she’s stationed downstage, alone and alienated, while  Blake’s Jim reports on a “Century of Progress” exposition. It’s a nice allusion to advances yet to be made.

In fact the play seems ripe for elaboration, as the entire Wingfield family is left behind, in some respect, by the world. (Are we to believe that Tom is “going to the movies” every night?) 

Instead, what we have is the first Gate production since the Colgan era that’s more classical than it is contemporary. 


Runs until June 1st.