The Glass Menagerie Archives - North West End UK

12Mar

By Ralph JeffreysNo Comments

London

The Glass Menagerie – The Yard Theatre

When the audience walked into the theatre, an actor was spray painting the wall of the stage, and smoke was being pumped into the air, a fitting start for an exceptional and anarchic evening of theatre. Tennessee Williams' classic play focuses on the Wingfields. Abandoned long ago by their father, the family are waiting on the promise of change, symbolised by the 'gentlemen caller' a figure who might come into the family's life and marry the daughter, Laura (Eva Morgan), giving her 'security', allaying her mother's (Sharon Small) fears, and allowing the son, Tom (Tom Varey), to be free of his obligations to them. What follows is a tender exploration of repressed desire. Photo: Manuel Harlan Jay Miller's direction is teeming with creative energy and takes an anarchic approach to sp...

20Apr

By Kira DanielsNo Comments

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 rat...

The Glass Menagerie – Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester

8Sep

By Paul WilcoxNo Comments

North West

The Glass Menagerie – Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester

Thomas 'Tennessee' Williams is widely regarded as one of the great American playwrights, the quality and extent of his output in the middle of the last century ensuring that his work still continues to form a staple diet for professional and amateur theatre all over the world. The Royal Exchange have chosen his first (and most autobiographical) play to kickstart its Autumn/Winter season, and after recent upheavals and some very odd programming decisions by this Mancunian institution, it is a welcome and sparkling return to form. 'The Glass Menagerie' is famously a 'memory play' told from the flawed perspective of the narrator Tom (Joshua James), unpacking his tense relationship with Mother Amanda Wingfield (Geraldine Somerville) and sister Laura (Rhiannon Clements) as they struggle to m...

First look at Amy Adams as Amanda Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie

30May

By Paul DownhamNo Comments

NEWS

First look at Amy Adams as Amanda Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie

Second Half Productions has today released production images for The Glass Menagerie, a new revival of Tennessee Williams's celebrated memory play, directed by award-winning director Jeremy Herrin. Performances began on 23rd May with Opening Night on 31st May 2022. The Glass Menagerie will run at The Duke of York’s Theatre until 27th August. Jeremy Herrin’s bold new staging explores the fragility and fallibility of memory in Tennessee Williams’s semi-autobiographical masterpiece. Six-time Academy Award nominated and two-time Golden Globe winning actress Amy Adams takes on the role of one of Williams’s most iconic matriarchs Amanda Wingfield, a former Southern Belle living precariously with her two children, Tom and Laura, in a space between past and present. Tony award-nominee Paul Hilt...