Atri Banerjee’s stylised, stripped-back production of Tennessee Williams’s Glass Menagerie first played in 2022 at the Manchester Royal Exchange (having been originally scheduled for 2020 before Covid scuppered those plans). Now a reworked version is moving audiences at the Rose Theatre in Kingston (I cried once with joy and once with sadness) before heading off on tour to Bristol and Bath and then reappearing in London at Alexandra Palace.
Geraldine Somerville reprises her role as Amanda Wingfield the Southern Belle who has exchanged the expansive plantations of her youth for a cramped apartment in St Louis, where she obsesses over the futures of her two adult children. Somerville brings a warmth and kindness to the role that’s not often seen, making her frustrations with and hopes for her two adult children seem entirely reasonable. Also reprising his role is young actor Kasper Hilton-Hille, who is captivating as the aspiring poet Tom, who’s stuck with a dead-end job in a warehouse. (Read our interview with him about the play here.)
Coming fresh to the cast is Natalie Kimmerling whose casting as Tom’s anxious and disabled sister Laura comes as a breath of fresh air after the furore over the Globe’s casting of Richard III. There is still a certain degree of blind casting in that Kimmerling has a disabled arm, while in the play Laura has a disabled leg, but this also brings out a freshness in the text. When her mother insists on typing school it feels a particularly ambitious dream and when Jim compliments her hands it feels wonderfully celebratory of Laura’s/Kimmerling’s uniqueness. When her mother finally calls her daughter “crippled”, a word she has asked others not to use, the audience visibly reels.
Kimmerling portrays Laura as a stronger character than she is sometimes seen. Laura knows how to regulate her emotions: by putting on the headphones of her walkman in this production, (playing phonograph records in the script) or by engaging with her glass menagerie and when her gentleman caller finally arrives (Zacchaeus Kayode plays Jim O’Connor) we see a visceral chemistry between them.
While some of the first half feels a little slow at times, the return after the interval, when Kayode finally comes on stage (he has floated around the edge for some of the first half) is electric. The long scene between Kayode and Kimmerling is captivating with a blissful “Dirty Dancing” style dream scene that left me wiping tears from my eyes.
Kayode plays Jim as the boy that all mothers would love their daughters to marry: polite, courteous and graceful. It makes the disappointment that ends the play all the more devastating and Kimmerling captures that devastation superbly in her response.
A core conflict in the play is between the suffocating confines of a cluttered apartment and the imagined expanse of the “great wide world” beyond (and the landscape of Amanda’s childhood where flowers were in abundance). And yet there is nothing domestic in Rosanna Vize’s stark design. Although chintz, sofas, lamps and coffee cups are referred to in the text, there is no colour or hint of domesticity on the glass-like circular stage from which rises a large metal pillar on which a neon light spins the word “Paradise” above the players. It looks almost identical to the Martin Creed installation “Mothers”, which is perhaps apt as the Glass Menagerie is in large part a reflection on mothering. Paradise is the name of the nightclub across the street, it is also the imagined perfect life that none of the characters will achieve.
Props, too, are largely missing. Yearbooks aren’t flicked through, programmes aren’t signed and family portraits aren’t examined. Instead in these moments we see what is really going on between the characters in their physical connection or distance to one another, without the need for any paraphernalia. We do have a glass menagerie: tiny figurines laid out on the edge of the playing area and in the second act vases of daffodils and candles occupy the circumference, but at a running time of two hours and 40 minutes the starkness became a little hard to look at.
Which brings us back to the acting, with little else to look at we look at the actors. So it’s a good job they are all performing at the top of their game.
CAST
Geraldine Somerville | Amanda Wingfield
Kasper Hilton-Hille | Tom Wingfield
Zacchaeus Kayode | Jim O’Connor
Natalie Kimmerling | Laura Wingfield
The creative team includes Atri Banerjee (Director), Rosanna Vize (Designer), Lee Curran (Lighting Designer), Giles Thomas (Composer and Sound Designer), Anthony Missen (Movement Director), Helena Palmer CDG (Casting Director), Darren Sinnott (Associate Director), Alys Whitehead(Associate Designer) and Robbie Butler (Associate Lighting Designer).
Rose Theatre 17 April – 4 May, and then touring until 1 June 2024
(Bristol Old Vic, 7-11 May | Theatre Royal Bath, 13-18 May | Alexandra Palace, 22 May-1 June)
Join the discussion