No matter how often I see The Glass Menagerie (1944), the first big success for Tennessee Williams, I cross my fingers that it will end differently. Maybe this time, I think, that marvellous extended scene, one of the finest individual segments of 20th-century drama, between fragile, crippled Laura and "gentleman caller" Jim, will lead to happiness in the midst of these stunted, stultifying lives. Each time I am resolutely disappointed but moved anew by Williams’s blunt reminder about the fragility of hope.
That scene is, as it must be, the high point of Joe Hill-Gibbins’s clear and precise production. Even so, there are moments when the time it takes to get there threatens to hang as heavy as the sultry southern air of Amanda Wingfield’s long-ago glory days. Amanda (Deborah Findlay), an impecunious former belle obsessed with memories of beaux past, stifles grown-up children Tom (Leo Bill) and Laura (Sinéad Matthews) with excessive attention, and the late-arriving Jim (Kyle Soller) with oppressive hospitality.
Findlay, all fake smiles and desperate determination, is superbly cast as the manipulative matriarch who talks rather than listens. Bill gives a fine sense of would-be poet Tom as someone living on increasingly frayed nerves. Yet it’s Matthews and Soller who set our pulses racing when they are left alone to trace that yearning trajectory from tentativeness to hope to disillusionment.
An opening monologue from Tom tells us that this is a "memory play" and Hill-Gibbins toys cleverly with the idea of theatricality. Red velvet "theatre" curtains hover above the split-level set, which is an intriguing mixture of the naturalistic and impressionistic. Its collapsed sense of room boundaries appears like something from a dream, or maybe nightmare, refracted through the light of the tiny titular animal figurines that lonely Laura cherishes.
Until Jan 1. Information: 020 7922 2922, young vic.org
The Glass Menagerie
Young Vic
The Cut, SE1 8LZ
