The problems begin with the menagerie itself: a looming cabinet, with creatures lined up as if rehearsing for Damien Hirst’s Forms Without Life. Tennessee Williams’s wonderful image of fragility, secret light and peculiarity becomes solid and confrontational in Jeremy Herrin’s production: under some lights, it looks like a vending machine.
The Glass Menagerie, one of the 20th century’s most emotionally quaking plays, is made of uncertainty and tremulousness. First produced in 1944 but set in the 30s, it is introduced by the narrator as taking place while Europe and America are in flux. A fictionalised account of Williams’s early life, it shows a fracturing family: a sister in precarious health; a dominating, haywire mother, obsessed with her own youth; a young man struggling to leave. A memory play, framed by speeches delivered by an older version of the son, it is declared to be a melting, unreliable account.
