Amy Adams as Amanda Wingfield
(Picture: Johan Persson)Always arresting on screen - in Junebug, Arrival, American Hustle or as Lois Lane to Henry Cavill’s Superman – Hollywood star Amy Adams makes a muted and unconvincing West End debut in Tennessee Williams’s play. As Amanda Wingfield, a straitened southern belle overseeing disabled daughter Laura and wayward son Tom in depressed 1930s St Louis, she is often indistinct, somewhat phony and offstage for a large chunk of the action.
Jeremy Herrin’s non-naturalistic staging emphasises the radicalism of Williams’s play when it was first staged in 1944 but I’ve always found it mawkish and humble-braggy. Tom, who also narrates, is a thinly veiled self-portrait of the aspiring author whose colleagues – at the warehouse job that is clearly beneath him - jokily call him ‘Shakespeare’. Likewise Amanda and Laura are fictionalised renderings of his mother and fragile sister.
