The Glass Menagerie - Royal Exchange - 6/04/08 by Julia Taylor

First produced in 1944, the Glass Menagerie is a Tennessee Williams classic set in a humble apartment in St Louis. My dictionary says that a menagerie is a collection of wild animals in cages for exhibition, or an unusual or outlandish assortment of people.

The ornamental animals held in the Glass Menagerie belonging to Laura, the daughter of the Wingfield family, aren’t in cages and, consequently, like their owner, get broken. Are the family themselves contained in a self-made, if invisible, cage? They are certainly an unusual group of people.

The one thing they are lacking is a father figure. Or, indeed, any male influence from outside the family. They are so insular that you almost feel you are intruding on their privacy. The Royal Exchange are lucky to have persuaded Brenda Blethyn who has been nominated for two Oscars and scooped the golden globe and Bafta awards for best actress in past performances, to join the cast.

In this play, Brenda is Amanda, the head of this unusual family which consists of herself, Tom, her grownup son, who uses every excuse to get out, and his sister, Laura, who doesn’t get out at all and has a limp. Amanda is a proud, not particularly likeable woman who once hoped to marry a man of substance. She ends up with a ‘telephone man’ who has deserted her.

This causes her to nag her kids to better themselves and she tries, comically at times, to act as a matchmaker for Laura. She is an amusing busy body who drowns any initiative her kids might have in “smother love”

It’s a captivating performance from a top ranking thespian especially in the scene when dressed as she was when a ‘Southern Belle’, Amanda flirts outrageously with the Gentleman caller. It falls to Tom (Mark Arends ) to act as narrator, a part he plays well. As Laura’s son, he is restless and discontented with home life. And surely, when he goes out at night, it’s not as he says, “to the movies”?

He is pent up with frustration and more than once Mark’s Tom to boils in uninhibited anger. However, it is he who brings some excitement into Laura’s dull life by introducing her to Jim, a “gentleman caller” whose arrival in the household makes the second act so compelling.

Emma Hamilton’s Laura is painfully shy and yet her true feelings come out in a candle lit scene with Jim. In a not-to-be-forgotten duologue, she and her beau don’t just exchange pleasantries but communicate from the heart. And, in Laura’s case, not just from the heart but in her eyes.

Emma cleverly reflects in a look, just what Laura is thinking. Andrew Langtree’s Jim is just the opposite to Laura. He is confident and slightly self-opinionated but also kind. There are some touching moments when the two are left alone.

Congratulations to Johanna Town who designed the neon lighting illustrating the neighbouring Paradise Dance Hall and also to Akintayo Akinbode who composed the gentle and unobtrusive background music.