Tennessee Williams’s narrator begins by speaking of all the ways a “memory play” conjures its effects: dim lighting, sentimentality, a lack of realism. This production uses those artifices and also boasts central star casting in Amy Adams, yet stops short of putting us under its spell.
Adams’s West End debut is solid but unremarkable. She plays Amanda Wingfield, the temperamental matriarch desperate to find a husband for her disabled daughter, Laura (Lizzie Annis) and keep a grip on her son, Tom (Tom Glynn-Carney), whose work at a shoe warehouse leaves him with itchy feet – and a desire to be away from this suffocating household in St Louis.
