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A smart, prickly and rewarding view of sexual and emotional confusion
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London,
Nicholas de Jongh's rating
Reader rating
Dir: Rupert Goold.
Cast: Jessica Lange, Ed Stoppard, Amanda Hale, Mark Umbers
Description: Poignant drama by Tennessee Williams, with Jessica Lange and Ed Stoppard. Tom Wingfield is torn between obligation towards his mother and sister, and desire to leave the stifling family set-up. Directed by Rupert Goold.
Trains: Tube: Piccadilly Circus 
Phone: 0870890 1101
Website: www.nimaxtheatres.com
Vulnerable: Jessica Lange plays the domineering Amanda, pining for her heyday as a Southern belle, prone to fantasies and vacuous chatter
It does not rise to stormy heights of painful conflict. It offers no revelation of secrets long-concealed, but Rupert Goold's dream-struck production of Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie finally convinces me this is one of the great, unhappy family-life plays in the modern American repertoire.
The unhappiness is not on the grand, terrible scale, like Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night, or beset by domestic cruelties as in Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
This is Williams's own early family life, a "memory play", his lower-middleclass blues for the Depression years in the Deep South - faintly disguised. You could describe it as Look Back In Angst, though traces of rueful comedy intervene.
The character of Tom, powerfully brought to dissatisfied life by Ed Stoppard and without that familiar belligerent glare of his, is Williams's alter ego and the play's narrator.
Obliged to earn a menial living while he longs to be a poet, this gay-sounding youth frequents late-night movie houses and plans to run away, as his father did years ago.
His mother Amanda pines for her days as a Southern belle whom all the beaux adored and aspires to have her handicapped daughter, Laura, married off.
All three end up stripped of their self-protecting illusions. Only Laura's menagerie of glass animals remain intact.
The crucial scene between Mark Umbers' handsome but unhappy Jim, the gentleman caller, and Amanda Hale's superlative, bedraggled Laura, eyes downcast and body language all doleful, is played with an overpowering sense of intimacy and delicacy.
In Umbers' brilliant, believable reading, the gentleman caller, engaged to a "homely" girl, genuinely falls for Laura, who has long nursed a secret passion for him. She gazes at him transfixed.
Having raised the girl's erotic hopes, he then comes to his senses and dashes them to pieces. Hale's face speaks tragic volumes as the might-have-been love affair fades out.
Acted with indelible pathos by Umbers and Hale, the scene serves notice that no modern playwright was better versed in sexual psychology or understood the dilemma of outsiders and misfits better.
Jessica Lange, The Glass Menagerie's prime misfit, makes a far less forceful impression. Domineering Amanda has faint traces of Blanche DuBois from A Streetcar Named Desire about her, and Lange prettily flutters and flutes in spectacular dresses.
She flirts gamely with the gentleman caller and becomes the model of the older, vulnerable Southern belle, prone to fantasies and vacuous chatter.
But Lange, never a dynamic figure on stage, makes garrulous Amanda a shrill, artificial, unfunny babbler rather than the complex figure of comic absurdity and frightened self-deception she ought be.
Goold demonstrates what fresh and daring steps Williams took in The Glass Menagerie. The stage is set for expressionism and more than a touch of Brecht, but Williams's nostalgic cinematic images are missing: Matthew Wright's evocative design consists of a humble, minimalist sitting room seen only in bare outline and with a picture-frame surround.
Several flights of spiral fire-exit stairs coil their way around this domestic scene. Adam Cork's plangent music, which is sometimes too loud and intrusive, and atmospheric lighting plots enhance the memorable stage-pictures.
Stoppard's fine, donkey-jacketed narrator haunts the action like some baleful ghost returned home.
Tom's beautifully spoken, final lament for Laura and his long-distance loneliness is surely Williams's grief for his own past.
Magical.
Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.
