The Glass Menagerie
Bristol Old Vic

STRIPPED of all the 1930s scenic clutter, most naturalistic productions of Tennessee Williams’s first successful play usually embrace, Atri Banarjee’s dynamically rejuvenated version takes the opening monologue as its lodestone — “a memory play” that is “not realistic” and where “everything happens to music.”

Rosanna Vize’s bare, tilted, dance floor-like stage with central column and illuminated, rotating PARADISE sign above allows movement director, Anthony Missen to turn the play into a symbolic slow dance, emphasising the tensions, fears and desires of the characters locked in their own claustrophobic worlds. 

Add to this Giles Thomas’s background score with occasional street sounds and the play truly has a dream-like quality that Williams demands. Thomas’s use of echoes to highlight some of the characters’ key emotional phrases and phone voices from out of the semi-dark also accentuates the nature of memories.

The outstanding cast led by Geraldine Somerville’s concerned matriarch Amanda are as much symbols as Williams wanted the narrator Tom to be. Somerville is a softly spoken, faded southern belle, but no Blanche DuBois.

Her insistent, concerned pestering of her children is the appeal of a bygone generation in an America blithely unaware of the impending war and even in moments of angered exasperation, her affection for her son and daughter and concern for their futures is manifest.

Her daughter Laura, played with heart-rending vulnerability by Natalie Kimmerling, comes to life and reveals her hidden self when her gentleman-caller (Zacchaeus Kayode) proves her crippling social anxiety can be overcome. The fantastical Dirty Dancing-style dream routine lifts her out of her isolation only to highlight her devastating sense of loss when their impassioned kiss comes to nothing.

Kasper Hilton-Hille’s Tom is the angry son and poet whose narration and movement around the edge of the stage reveals the pent-up desperation to escape the frustration of his mother’s expectations and a dead-end job that shape all his actions when on stage with his family. 

Williams’s play is fully revitalised in this inspired touring show and though the sense of period is not lost, the essence of this meticulously choreographed and musically accompanied production is the timeless nature of memories shaped by family love, loyalty and unachieved desires. 

Runs until May 11, then on tour. Box office: 0117 987-7877, bristololdvic.org.uk.