Review - The Glass Menagerie

The Glass Menagerie

By Tennessee Williams

Directed by Eamon Flack

Jim O’Connor – Harry Greenwood

Tom Wingfield – Luke Mullins

Amanda Wingfield – Pamela Rabe

Laura Wingfield – Rose Riley

Video Design Consultant – Sean Bacon

Lighting Designer – Damien Cooper

Composer and Sound Design – Stefan Gregory

Set Designer – Michael Hankin

Costume Designer – Mel Page

Merlyn Theatre – Malthouse

18 May to 5 June 2016

This Belvoir Street production of The Glass Menagerie is not for the faint hearted it is long and robust, contemporary and acutely perceptive.

As the quasi-autobiographical ‘Memory Play,’ of Tennessee Williams’s early adult life in a small apartment with his deluded mother and vulnerable fragile sister, with whom he felt a deep connection, is especially revealing. 

Although Tom, the Williams character, is able to walk away into another life it is an era when women had limited options.  So the only respectable way out of a dysfunctional family setting for daughter Laura is through marriage.   However due to social isolation and desperate shyness and a mild disability she has no mobility and is doomed to spinsterhood.   And yet there is a poignant glimmer of hope.

Interesting choices have been made around characterization.  Rose Riley plays Laura in a lovely open way - using a natural voice and unapologetic physical presence.  Riley’s Laura exhibits some startling, deeply disturbing and telling behavioral traits.

Harry Greenwood plays Jim O’Connor, the gentleman visitor, with sympathetic self-awareness.  He doesn’t overtly express any sense of repulsion that his character might be feeling towards Amanda and Laura and the smothering situation in which he finds himself.  This adds a rich dimension to the second act and the touching scene between Laura and the gentleman caller that is delightful staged and enhanced by marvelous lighting  (Damien Cooper).

As Tom Wingfield Luke Mullins shines.  He brings the audience in to his world with the seemingly effortless charm of Tennessee Williams.  He moves fluidly in and around the apartment through windows, doors and curtains, documenting all the while - particularly through the setting of cameras. 

Pamela Rabe’s characterization of the stifling, disturbed Mother Amanda is inescapably larger than life.  She is a grand puppet master – with invisible strings jerking at her children’s emotional well being.  There is an uncanny sense that the set (Michael Hankin) is a little smaller than a real life apartment and has something of a dolls house about it.   Rabe’s Amanda fills and dominates this space.  Sometimes what she mutters seems almost indistinguishable as though she is not fully expecting her children to be listening to her. 

Desperation and insecurity imbues this archetypal ‘Southern Bell’ who has been rejected and escaped by a philandering husband.   She is left with two very sensitive adult children with whom a dance of crippling codependency takes hold.  Ambivalence reigns and emotional blackmail abounds.  It has the potential to touch any raw nerve of familial dysfunction in the viewer.

As director Eamon Flack has elicited very strong choices from his cast and creatives that allows for a truly insightful production highlighting isolation, vulnerability and replacing some of the pathos usually emphasized with a contemporary sense of angst, even anger.   

One could be forgiven for thinking that Flack has imposed a contemporary post –modern sensibility on this staging through a use of multi media.  However nothing could be further from the truth as a great many of the stage directions and particularly the use of filmic projections are specified in the text.

Beautiful rich melodies transport the audience from scene to scene thanks to sound designer Stefan Gregory.

Mel Page’s costuming is great including having Amanda wear a man’s dressing gown and a dress that she has definitely grown out of  - with a zip on the back that doesn’t fully do up.

Tennessee Williams is truly honoured through this insightful production.

Suzanne Sandow
(For Stage Whispers)

Review - Vieux Carre

Itch Productions Presents

Vieux Carre

By Tennessee Williams

Director/Co-produer/Costume Design – Alice Bishop, Lighting Design – John Dutton, Set Design and Scenic Artist – Alexandra Hiller, Vocal Coaches – Les Cartwright and Jarrod Benson, Stage Manager – Harriet Gregory and Set Construction – Colin Orchard.

Cast:  Writer – Thomas Blackburne, Mrs. Wire – Kelly Nash, Nursie - Francesca Water, Jane Sparks – Samantha Murray, Nightingale – Stephen Whittaker, Pick up/T. Hamilton Biggs/Tourists/Hospital Orderly – Dallas Palmer, Mary Maude – Maureen Hartley, Miss Carrie – Brenda Palmer, Tye McCool – Des Fleming and Sky/patrolman Josh Blau.

For Midsummer Festival at 45 Downstairs

January 17 to February 3

Thomas Blackbourne - Photo: Justin Kane

They say the best thing a Director can do for her actors is create the appropriate atmosphere for a play’s characters to come to life in.  For invoking a magic little part of New Orleans in the 1930’s, at 45 Downstairs, full marks must go to Alice Bishop, as director of this rich and satisfying production of Vieux Carre by Tennessee Williams.   

As a fascinating piece of theatre history it is a two-act play of the type fast becoming ‘museum pieces’.  Themes are dramatic and almost melodramatic but never the less universal.  On a life-like stage we are treated to the kind of poetic naturalism that had its hay-day in the 1950s and 60s.   For decades this type of staging was the conservative norm that the reactionary Avant-garde theatre of the 70’s and 80’s pitted itself against.  (It is the style of production still manifest in many amateur theatres).  As accessible theatre/storytelling this genre of play and production makes easy and comfortable sense to a ‘lay audience’ particularly as stories generally flow sequentially.

That said - to set the scene and enhance atmosphere in this particular production fabulous blues guitar is beautifully rendered by Bob McGowan and cleverly and crisply piped into the auditorium. Impressive sound design throughout is by Nat Grant.

As the evening progresses, on an evocative set of a shabby rooming house in the old French Quarter of New Orleans, by Alexandra Hiller, we gradually become privy to aspects of the lives of controlling landlady Mrs. Wire (Kelly Nash), maid Nursie (Francesca Waters) and a number of disparate tenants and visitors.  All this is seen through the eyes of a young poet/writer - denoting the emerging voice of poet/playwright Tennessee Williams (Thomas Blackburne).

Blackburne delivers a neutral seemingly un-shock-able narrator, a young man of an empathetic condition, around who people unashamedly and expressively expose their needy and volatile lives.

Thomas Blackbourne and Stephen Whittaker - Photo:Justin Kane

All actors portray their complex, all too human characters, with skill and clarity.  Stephen Whittaker works with the significant challenge of the character Nightingale, an aging gay man suffering TB, walking the fine line of conveying predator and victim.  Maureen Hartley and Brenda Palmer as Miss Maude and Miss Carrie bring light-relief with their delightful and charming, kooky but compromised, spinsters.

In this type of classic work Act I is the exposition and Act II furthers the story and offers a sense of resolve.  The first half is palpably about loneliness highlighted by a poignant monologue, rendered skillfully by Nash as Mrs. Wire.  Act II, amongst other themes explores aspects of dying, acceptance and finally escape.

The second half dwells on the youngish, erstwhile, fashion designer Jane Sparks (Samantha Murray) ‘fallen on hard times’ and confronting her worst fears, and ousting her seedy lover Tye McCool, whom she seems to have ‘fallen in with’ accidentally like a martyr.  Murray shines as Sparks and Fleming’s McCool is a strong consistent, convincing presence throughout the whole.  It flows more evenly than the first, and has accumulated power to move the audience, from the understandings already gleaned.  

Thomas Blackbourne and Samantha Murray Photo: Justin Kane

This is a play and production that many will thoroughly enjoy. 

Highly recommended as a painstakingly well-produced intriguing piece of classic theatre history.

Suzanne Sandow