Wednesday, May 1

Tag: Tennessee Williams

The Glass Menagerie – Rose Theatre
London

The Glass Menagerie – Rose Theatre

Directed by Atri Banerjee and designed by Rosanna Vize, this stylized performance of Tennessee Williams’ iconic family drama both juices up and strips down the physical environs of a timeless story, but its enduring appeal is undulled by theatrical innovation. A restaging both faithful to its formidable script and imbued with a magic of its own, this production is truly enchanting. Geraldine Somerville scintillates as the reluctant matriarch Amanda Wingfield whose erstwhile husband “fell in love with long distances” and hasn’t appeared in more than a decade save in his grinning portrait on the family’s mantle. This production’s rendering of the Wingfield family home places this mantle on the invisible fourth wall which is neither broken nor ever explicitly mended in this staging but ra...
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof – Liverpool Playhouse
North West

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof – Liverpool Playhouse

Tennessee Williams' searing masterpiece is brought back to the stage with this joint production between Curve Leicester, The English Touring Theatre and Liverpool Everyman/Playhouse. It’s a play about deception, greed, sexual desire, self- delusion and how lies seem so much more important than truth. Set on one hot Mississippi night, the highly dysfunctional Pollitt family meet up to celebrate Big Daddy’s 65th birthday and from the start all the characters begin their gameplay in earnest. Williams’s beautifully constructed play has many elaborate and intoxicating layers and explores each fractured character in great depth – his dialogue is always stark and unrelenting, and director (Anthony Almeida) lets each of the actors shine in all the iconic parts. Big Daddy played by (Pe...