PETER MASON applauds the revival, 39 years later with the same team and cast, of Manfred Karge’s version of Brecht’s 100-year-old play, Mann Ist Mann
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
[Marc Brenner]
MAYER WAKEFIELD applauds a fearless attempt to bring to the stage the 1984 toxic gas disaster in Bhopal, India
ALEX HALL applauds the account of a dogged, traumatic and punishing campaign for justice that has lasted from 1998 to the present day
NICK WRIGHT laments the political bias of an epic attempt to tell the history of the liberation of France from the Nazis, that excludes both the decisive contribution of the Soviet Red Army, and of the French communist party itself
JOE GILL traces the ideology and method of contemporary imperialism back to the greed, hubris and violence of the late 15th century Portuguese
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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