Upstaged Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Some things are just worth waiting for. And this new production of Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie is absolutely one of these things. When the Royal Exchange was forced to close back in March 2020, due to the Covid pandemic, the next production due on stage was this revival of The Glass Menagerie. The team had started work but the show was put on hold. Now two years later, and three years in the making, with director Atri Banerjee at the helm, Williams’ poetic masterpiece sits beautifully within the domed setting of the Royal Exchange.
Described as an ‘intense memory play’, The Glass Menagerie tells the story of a family on the verge of change. Two children live a suffocating home life with their overbearing mother; chain-smoking Tom frequently escapes to the cinema while his sister retreats into a world of music and her collection of glass animals. A stifling web of tension, trauma and hope, the story is told through Tom’s memories.
A huge revolving lit-up sign reading ‘paradise’ looms over the performance, moving anti-clockwise, it continues to turn throughout most of the play. Rosanna Vize’s stripped-back set of a highly polished floor catches reflections of the characters as they travel across the stage, echoing their fragility and the dreamlike disorder of their existence.
As both narrator and protagonist, Joshua James moves the play along despite being visibly trapped by the constraints of his life, he moves backwards and forwards across the stage, but never really gets anywhere. Geraldine Somerville captures the dichotomy of Amanda Wingfield perfectly. I find myself grimacing with pleasure watching her; uncomfortable to watch, erratic and excruciating – she walks a tight line between a mother who scolds her son for his drive to lose himself in the fiction of film, but then lives her own relationship fiction through her daughter as she tries to steer her into a romance with potential suitor Jim O’Connor. Rhiannon Clements’ barefoot and wide-eyed Laura is shy, delicate and utterly vulnerable in contrast to her mother. There is a desperate glimmer of hope and playfulness in the interactions between her and Eloka Ivo’s Jim O’Connor, particularly when they dance to Whitney Houston’s ‘One Moment in Time’, a sequence worthy of the applause it received on the night I attended.
Atri Banerjee has shaped a beautiful production – sensitive and bold – with revealing, nuanced and wonderfully uncomfortable characters. Completely compelling.
-Kristy Stott
The Glass Menagerie runs at the Royal Exchange until 8 October 2022.