The Glass Menagerie at the Royal Lyceum

Tennessee Williams’ semi-autobiographical play ought to be a harrowing and frustrating view into the lives of a family struggling against a backdrop of the Depression. But under Jemima Levick's direction, much of the potential drama is displaced.

Amanda Wingfield, deserted matriarch, attempts to direct—and, so she believes, save—the lives of her children. Her son and our narrator, Tom, believes himself to be part of the new, liberated generation while his crippled sister Laura scarcely speaks and tends to her collection of glass creatures. Caught up in rose-tinted remembrances of her own former beauty and popularity, Amanda embarks on a tireless search for a "gentleman-caller" for her daughter, the occasion of both the most tender and pathetic moments in the play.

But despite the Depression lurking outside, the most we are shown of the outside world is a reflection, the light of a mirror-ball from a red-lit bar across the street. Meanwhile, Laura eschews reality, turning instead to her glass animals for comfort. It is these fragile ornaments which break when reality invades in the form of the gentleman caller. Unfortunately, there is another less intentional intrusion. The unconvincing American accents of the cast fracture the realism of the production, however Joseph Arkley as Tom Wingfield holds the stage so intently as to reduce the effects.

While director Jemima Levick does indeed illuminate some of the poignant moments and crucial ideas within the play, she seems to have left designer Jessica Brettle and lighting designer Chris Davey to accomplish via aesthetics what she could not through direction. While Brettle’s set is undoubtedly excessive in its attempts to communicate the breakdown of the exterior world at the same time as the interior ones onstage, the payback is a fairly arresting visual image. The triumph of the production, however, must be Davey’s exquisite lighting, which creates alternating impressions of sunny daylight and quasi-lightning of cracked window panes.

The absent male or father-figure is kept neatly present by way of a lit portrait and a see-through fourth chair at the dinner-table in which no-one dares to sit. Left alone, Amanda Wingfield represents a type of strong mother familiar to contemporaries of Williams: Bessie Berger in Clifford Odets’s Awake and Sing, for example. And so it is a shame that, by contrast, Barbara Marten’s Amanda feels at times insincere, appearing sometimes to be a caricature rather than a fully rounded character.

The cast ably create a genial, often comic family atmosphere on stage, but the production lacks intensity: several of the moments which ought to be set-pieces of mounting tension are passed over. However it is, with certain caveats, a worthy interpretation of Williams’s moving play.