Tennessee Williams’s much-loved 1944 memory play The Glass Menagerie centres on Amanda Wingfield, a Southern matriarch who has always shapeshifted with the production’s approach. She can be girlish or sturdy, loveable or laughable, a sexist figure of fun or a feminist survivor. At London’s Duke of York’s Theatre, Amy Adams’s interpretation is sympathetic, free of the trappings of fading Southern-belle kitsch the role often comes with. This is a woman who’s bearing the weight of familial responsibility in Depression-era St Louis with a kind of beleaguered grace, marshalling her hapless adult son and daughter with an unexpected kindness. But although director Jeremy Herrin’s take brings new warmth to the family ties at the heart of this play, he doesn’t capture the wit and strangeness that have won it such a devoted following.
His most visible innovation is to split the role of aspiring writer Tom, who narrates the story, into two roles: the shambling, magician-like Paul Hilton plays the older version, while the awkward, teenagerish Tom Glynn-Carney takes the part of his younger self. It’s not a choice that particularly illuminates the play. Tennessee Williams closely based The Glass Menagerie on his own upbringing, and the character of Tom on himself – part of the play’s magic usually comes from this gawky storyteller’s showmanship, and his ability to transport himself back to the cramped apartment where he grew up. Here, that central transfiguration is lost.
