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.
Vicki Mortimer’s set does suggest some dreamlike disorder. The action is perched on a stage fringed by a clutter of lamps and chairs and record players. Yet it is overshadowed by indistinct videos from Ash J Woodward that confusingly mix a realistic backdrop – iron stairways – with suggestions of miasma. Characterisation is blunt. Amy Adams, making her West End debut and advertised as the draw of the evening, is persuasive as a frustrated hausfrau, bustling and twittering, got up in bun and housecoat so that she looks as if she has popped out of a cuckoo weather clock. Yet she never seems haunted by her days as a southern belle: her voice stays at the same (highish) pitch throughout; when she slips into the gown she wore as a girl, she is rightly awkward as she swishes its folds, yet never casts a further spell of melancholy.
The play is far more effective if all the characters are tugged by memories. One actor usually plays the son, in his youth and as the narrator: here the part is split into two, acted by a wistful Paul Hilton and, as his younger self, Tom Glynn-Carney; both are underused, and a layer of time-smudging is lost. The highlight of the evening is the scene between strong Victor Alli as the conventional, unintentionally wounding “gentleman caller” and Lizzie Annis as the shy, lamed Laura. Annis, described in the programme as having cerebral palsy, makes her professional stage debut with exactly the right precarious radiance. She is like a glass creature on a slippery ledge.
Eileen Walsh has been a passionate presence on the stage ever since she appeared as a teenager rapping out Enda Walsh’s made-up language in Disco Pigs. Now she burns away in Girl on an Altar, Marina Carr’s reimagining of the story of Clytemnestra, the mother of Iphigenia, who was sacrificed by her father Agamemnon to appease the gods and ensure the success of his fleet.
Annabelle Comyn’s distinguished production for the Kiln (in partnership with the Abbey theatre, Dublin) fuses two strong trends in current theatre: the use of classical Greek literature to provide a secular ritual in arbitrarily harsh, revengeful times, and the retelling of stories from the point of view, formerly buried, of women. Cassandra the prophetess, snatched from Troy – who would herself make a powerful subject for a drama – has a prominent role, played with melancholy patience by Nina Bowers, as does the nurse Cilissa, an impressive Kate Stanley Brennan. David Walmsley muscles it formidably as angry Agamemnon, squaring up to the woman who desires and loathes him.
The violent action – which includes a body in a silver bath and terrible searches for children who have disappeared – is often ritualised; its detail more frequently described than seen. Actors are their own chorus. They are often still – caught in stately gestures like figures on a Greek vase – but Carr’s compacted, insistent language and an incandescent design by Tom Piper (set) and Amy Mae (lighting) create a searing evening. Against black sliding walls with shutters allowing only peeps of light, Walmsley is often illuminated in red. Torrential grisliness is delivered with restrained force: “evil and edge in the air”.
Earlier this year the playwright Barney Norris put on a “piano play” with his father, the pianist David Owen Norris, interspersing autobiographical reflection with music. His new play echoes this: family history is interleaved with Dido’s Lament and folk song – and a nod to Housman’s “blue remembered hills”. We Started to Sing would carry more conviction had it also been called autobiography; as it is, sweet fragments of memory meander in search of a reason for being staged.
Home videos run behind crucial moments in the lives of three generations of a family: most have to do with moving house; all are made up of doggedly naturalistic dialogue, packed with domestic detail about packing and schools (Barney’s reading comes in for praise). A pre-emptive strike on criticism is made by laughing at plays in which nothing happens apart from people looking back. Two performances elevate the occasion: Robin Soans is taut: by turns exasperating, ingenious, and touching. Barbara Flynn, so bewitchingly knowing on 80s television (The Beiderbecke Affair and A Very Peculiar Practice) beautifully dispenses her subtlety: a spirited conscience, winking wit.
Star ratings (out of five)
The Glass Menagerie ★★
Girl on an Altar ★★★★
We Started to Sing ★★
The Glass Menagerie is at the Duke of York’s, London, until 27 August
Girl on an Altar is at the Kiln, London, until 25 June
We Started to Sing is at the Arcola, London, until 18 June
