Most people will know the story: Tom, the son, suppresses his ambition working at a warehouse by day to support his mother and sister and spends his nights escaping to the movies. He is urged by his mother Amanda, who still harks back to her long-lost youth, to bring home prospective husbands for his sister Laura who has dropped out of college and, it seems, of life.
It’s an intense and brilliantly observed window on the lives of a broken family that exists on the edge although there are occasional flashes of wit and humour. Within minutes of it starting your ears tune into the Southern States accents and you are drawn into the timeless daily bickering of a family confined to a small apartment and worried for the future.
Greta Scacchi was a tour de force as Amanda. One moment she was all wailing and weeping, then frustrated, domineering and nagging and then finally girly and coquettish.
I was astonished by the performance of Erin Doherty as Laura. She played the shy, timid and crippled sister sensitively and adeptly. Such was the strength of her performance of this damaged creature, that her discomfort in social situations was almost palpable. When she became lost in her own world talking about her one past crush or her adored glass animals she was spell-binding.
Jim (played confidently by Eric Kofi Abrefa) lit the stage with his energy and passion. The scene between Jim and socially inept Laura was touchingly tender.
The staging was simplicity itself – stark almost. Tom (played by Tom Mothersdale) doubles as narrator to set the scene, comment comically as the story unfolds and summarise his sad thoughts about the sister he abandoned.
I couldn’t help reflect that the play’s social commentary about the role of cinema in people’s lives then could almost be a applied to the impact of social media today. And I considered too how over-anxious and demanding mothers can inadvertently drive their children away – the same way they might have driven away their husbands.
The audience was varied – the regular theatre goers and lots of A level students who are currently studying Tennesse Williams’ “A streetcar named desire”.
The Glass Menagerie is showing at Richmond Theatre until Saturday.
