Alexandra Palace Theatre, til 1 June 2024 – may tour elsewhere

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Emmerling and Somerville shine, finding tenderness and heartbreak in this worthy adaptation of a classic.

It’s funny how your perspective on a story can change over time. When I first picked up a Tennessee Williams anthology as a teen, it was Chance and Alexandra from the Sweet Bird of Youth that captured my attention – while The Glass Menagerie simply frustrated me. In all my teenage superiority, I just couldn’t bring myself to sympathise with poor Laura Wingfield; the lonely wallflower seemed to me the author of her own dismal fate. And yet when I saw Atri Banerjee’s adaptation at the Ally Pally theatre last Saturday, I was transfixed. In Natalie Kimmerling’s performance I saw the anxiety, the isolation and the innocence of Laura that I’d missed in my earlier reading. This is a beautiful retelling of a tender story, effectively capturing the fragile female spirit that crops up so frequently in Williams’ plays. 

The Glass Menagerie sees an older Tom Wingfield recounting his memories of being a young man in the 1930s, trapped in a claustrophobic flat with his mother and sister. The overbearing Amanda constantly wheedles her adult children, desperately coaxing them to fulfill the gentrified ideal she lost out on thanks to her long-ago-absented husband. While Tom escapes through his writing ambitions and long nights away from the flat, his younger sister Laura, already made shy by the missing hand that renders her an outsider, turns ever more inward. Unable to face the world around her, she drops out of college and spends her days playing with her collection of fragile glass animals. A pinprick of hope – a ticket out for all of them – emerges in the shape of a deal between mother and son: in exchange for freedom from his cage, Tom will bring home a ‘gentleman caller’ as a potential suitor for Laura.

This is very much a ‘talking play’; the characters are explored through their interactions with one another, not the plot. As such, its success relies on the cast, and the four actors here step up to the plate. Kasper Hilton-Hille and Zacchaeus Kayode do well as Tom and Jim (the gentleman caller), but this play belongs to the women. In particular, Kimmerling’s performance is agonising and as I mentioned, she brings out the heartbreak in this play that I had never connected with before. Though I’m sure my newfound sympathy must be somewhat due to age-induced mellowing on my part, Emmerling’s performance allowed me to really feel Laura’s anxiety and her fear – and be crushed by her inevitable failures. This Laura is also somehow less pitiful than the one I had remembered; in her moments with Tom, Emmerling allows Laura’s relaxed, even playful side to shine through. Geraldine Somerville similarly gives a standout performance as matriarch Amanda; though she’s essentially the villain of the piece, we see that she really does feel her children’s suffering keenly (even if she can’t understand how much she is the cause of it). 

Banerjee’s direction and vision for this play is mostly very effective. The set is largely stripped back aside from the enormous, dominating ‘paradise’ sign in neon that rotates and shifts colours; a hotel sign from across the street, it’s at once mesmerising and oppressive. I will say that there were a few directing and staging choices I questioned; for example there’s a deliberate attempt to pull this story out of a specific time and place with costumes and props (such as Laura’s ‘gramophone’ appearing as a walkman), which I didn’t feel added much to the story. I also felt there was rather a missed opportunity to explore just how biased Tom is as a narrator, given we are listening to him recount potentially hazy memories. The original play calls for projections to be displayed above the stage; by today’s standards, this would be too simplistic, but I felt there could have been more stylistic elements added to play with our sense of reality. 

This is just nitpicking though, and I notice this is turning into one of my shorter reviews. Perhaps in the case of a Williams play, the formula really is this simple: find actors who understand the depth of their characters, and let them have at it. Better analysts than me have explored how this may be Williams’ most autobiographical play – an aspiring writer essentially leaving behind his mentally struggling sister is eerily similar to Williams’ own life. The Glass Menagerie was and remains a beautiful, touching play, and this adaptation – thanks in no small part to the performances of Emmerling and Somerville – does it justice.