The Glass Menagerie, Drama Barn
Rating: 
Date: 09/02/07 - 11/02/07
Emma Miles’s production of Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie was ideally suited to the Barn’s intimacy; the play claustrophobically takes place in a house in which a mother and her two children are psychologically and financially trapped.
During the first half-hour the pace was stilted and the dialogue clunky. However, the cast later found their feet, with a particularly notable portrayal of Amanda Wingfield by Steph Burton, capturing the tensions between Amanda’s neurotic motherly concerns and attempts to put on a brave face. She found comedy in the role too, especially when her son brings home a ‘gentleman caller’ for his sister. Her nervous endeavors to entertain him had a lightness of touch rendered comic by underlying desperation. Anna Pinkstone was restrained as daughter Laura, slightly physically handicapped – and emotionally handicapped, too, by intense shyness.
One directorial decision hampered the production: the inclusion of the unnecessary and usually ignored projections. These clarified obvious symbolisms or highlighted important lines, in a way that was patronising and even accidentally comic. The fact that it looked like a PowerPoint presentation in Arial type didn’t help and undermined Miles’s subtler moments of direction.
