REVIEW: Smashing glass memories

I have never understood why Americans included Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie in their canon of great plays.

I certainly got why his Streetcar Named Desire is rated so highly (a marvellous play) but The Glass Menagerie seemed to me to be a weaker, dour, unsatisfactory thing (based on a performance I saw some years ago).

So I was completely startled by the Auckland Theatre Company’s exquisite production. Jef Hall-Flavin, a visiting American director (no less than the executive director of the Tennessee Williams Theatre Festival), brought alive a funny (there was no humour in the earlier version I saw, which largely whined), charming, delicate and sweet play.

The set by John Parker on Selwyn College’s wide theatre stage could not have been better, giving hints of the Great Depression outside and a cramped apartment inside that slowly circled to give us changing perspectives of its inhabitants.

The costumes were particularly delicious.

On the face of it, the tale is simple: Tom, the narrator, tells us he is recalling living with his mother and sister in the 1930s in St Louis.

From the deep south

His mother, originally a debutante from the deep south who fell for the charms of a postal worker who has long since abandoned her, lives in poverty and struggles to find a normal life for her shy and crippled daughter and worries that her son is not trying to advance himself.

He, on the other hand, is increasingly determined to run away, like his father, driven by her harridan ways. His mother persuades him to bring home a potential gentleman caller for his sister: this meeting is the high point of the play.

Antonia Prebble plays a fragile, tense young woman, too shy to continue a business course but who opens up completely to the visitor, Jim. Her acting is very fine. Her use of the tiniest of gestures and movements is mesmerising.

Laura is swept up in the young man’s gauche enthusiasm and optimism (and pompous criticism – he tells her she has an inferiority complex) and agrees to try to dance, briefly succeeding.

Jim, played convincingly by Richard Knowles, enthusiastically kisses her before backing off and revealing he is going steady with another woman (unguarded little movements reveal her unspoken melancholy).

But even though he also proceeds to break a unicorn from her treasured glass animal collection (the glass menagerie) she has gained so much from the encounter that she forgivingly gives him the broken unicorn.  

Throughout the play, Tom, played by Edwin Wright, has presented himself enigmatically. We see how irritated he is by his mother harping on and how he heads off to the “movies” and comes home royally drunk in the early hours and has to be woken on the sofa to go to work. 

But even given this is his memory play, his mother keeps asking why he goes so often to the movies at all hours and he reveals separately that he writes poetry in the men’s toilets at the shoe warehouse where he works; yet he wants to run off and become a seaman.

Playwright Tennessee Williams was famously gay: one has to wonder if Tom’s behavior is a secret code for that. Wright played this role cleverly and coolly; we weren’t to learn Tom’s secrets or regrets.

At the start, Tom emphasises that because it’s a memory play, it comes with strains of music; we are meant, I think, to take from that that it’s how his imagination recalls events. Memory, of course, is known to be unreliable: can we trust Tom’s?

A rather different light

That throws a rather different light on his mother, played by Elizabeth Hawthorne with great skill, though her southern accent was shaky.

She is forced to play a domineering mother given this is Tom’s version of events (and this may be more secret coding, given that for many years people argued that men became gay because they had domineering mothers).

I thoroughly enjoyed her Amanda explaining why she wanted the best for her children and completely agreed with her determination: otherwise what would happen to her daughter?

She was an energetic force but her part in the gentleman caller’s scenes reminded me what I most disliked in this play when I first saw it: the mother humiliating herself and her family in her utter desperation to keep the gentleman caller from leaving, even prancing and dancing round like the 18-year-old she once was, trying to use her fading southern belle charm.

It didn’t ring true and I disliked the playwright looking through Tom’s eyes in such a cruel way. I am also completely unconvinced that an upper class southern belle would so demean herself even in desperation.

This play was hosted by Selwyn College because the Maidment Theatre was recently damaged by fire. The company looked at 30 venues before finding something suitable. 

All the more reason for sponsors to come forward to help build its dream theatre on the Auckland waterfront. Come on Auckland, we don’t want to lose another theatre company.