ALEX HALL is disgusted by the misuse of ‘emotional narratives’ to justify uninformed geo-political prejudice
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The mother, the daughter, her lover and their poet
SIMON PARSONS marvels at a production of Williams’s early masterpiece that transforms the play into a symbolic slow dance of tensions, fears and desires
ALL IN THE MIND: Zacchaeus Kayode, Natalie Kimmerling, Geraldine Somerville and Kasper Hilton-Hille in the Glass Menagerie
SUE TURNER welcomes a thoughtful, engaging book that lays bare the economic realities of global waste management
JOHN GREEN welcomes an insider account of the achievements and failures of the transition to democracy in Portugal
SIMON PARSONS applauds an imaginative and absorbing updating of Strindberg’s classic
PETER MASON is enthralled by an assembly of objects, ancient and modern, that have lain in the mud of London’s river
MICK McSHANE rubs shoulders with Mod legend Steve Craddock and joins in with the joyous Glasgow choir
DENNIS BROE sifts out the ideological bias of the newest TV series offerings, and picks out what to see, and what to avoid
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.
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