Is there a better scene in American theatre? The jangle of domestic life ruled by a pushy mother has subsided. The outside world, embodied by the restless young hero, is absent. A young girl, shy and lame, is wooed out of awkwardness by a young man she knew long ago. He is sweet to her; she expands and blossoms; they dance. For a brief interval amid the melancholy of The Glass Menagerie, hope soars. In a drama that looks back in sadness, for a moment time stands still. The audience are brilliantly cheated from facing what they know to be true: that there will be no happy ever after.
John Tiffany’s staging of this intense episode is alone worth the price of a ticket. As the damaged Laura, inspired by Tennessee Williams’s own sister, Kate O’Flynn imposes herself even while she seems to retreat. She managed a similar conjuring trick – though not at all the same performance – four years ago as a gawky, compelling adolescent in Simon Stephens’s Port. Here she pulls a tremulous vitality – a gleam on the face, a quickened voice – from what seemed to be complete blankness. It is part of Williams’s genius that the man who shatters her briefly awakened hopes is a decent chap. He leaves her as impaired as her favourite glass ornament – with no cad to blame. Brian J Smith gives this gentleman caller just the right clumsy good intention: easy and understated.
That is not Cherry Jones’s way. When Tiffany staged this production, first seen in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at the Edinburgh festival last summer, Jones – star of many Broadway shows including Doubt and The Heiress – was hailed for her commanding performance as Laura’s mother, Amanda. Something seems to have happened. She is forceful all right, but stiffer than anyone else on stage, with jerky, repetitive hand gestures and a boom to her delivery. It is a relief not to have a caricature of a faded belle clanging around the stage, but too often Jones makes her power look like heartiness, as if she is about to encourage everyone to saddle up.
The play swims beautifully between realism and dream. To see it is to recognise the source of many playwrights’ daring – Arthur Miller, among them. Tiffany’s production captures its fluidity, with Steven Hoggett’s choreography requiring actors to mime occasionally and a score from Nico Muhly that sends music lightly hovering over the action. Natasha Katz’s lighting is key, with each scene enclosed in its own illumination. Laura and the gentleman caller act in a bubble fringed with darkness. There are Chinese lanterns and a scatter of fairy lights on water. In one wonderful moment, Laura’s face is made radiant by light from the glass unicorn she cherishes.
Tiffany’s production also points to a wholly unexpected – to me – topical aspect; a sense of the abyss between America and Europe. “In Spain there was Guernica! But here there was only hot swing music and liquor… and sex that hung in the gloom.” Alternative facts, I suppose.
The Glass Menagerie is a play of long reach and reverberations. Few dramas have been less concerned with being up to date. Which makes its intersections with modernity startling, like those passages in Shakespeare where you have to look up the text to check something has not been written in for “relevance”.
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