The Glass Menagerie at Alexandra Palace Theatre

In Atri Banerjee’s adaptation of Tennessee Williams’s beloved 1944 memory play, a towering neon sign on the stage that reads “Paradise” casts a starkly ironic glow, taunting the Wingfield family with the unreachable amidst their bleak reality. Set during the Great Depression, Banerjee’s direction of The Glass Menagerie takes contemporary liberties that relay universal human truths about family dysfunction – and its baggage of pain, disappointment, loss and regret – that always seem to find their mark.

The play is guided by Tom Wingfield’s (Kasper Hilton-Hille) retrospective – and admittedly unreliable – narration as he recalls his suffocating life in his family home before he left for good. A dreamer trapped in a boring warehouse job, he finds escape through cigarettes and excessive visits to the movies. Meanwhile, his sister Laura (Natalie Kimmerling), whose severe social anxiety and disability make her feel incapable of living in the real world, slips into her illusionary world of glass animals. Their lifestyle choices provoke heated clashes with their relentless single mother, Amanda (Geraldine Somerville); she runs frantically between unfairly projecting her contempt for her deserted husband onto Tom, and finding a “gentleman caller” for Laura, worried her daughter will otherwise drift away without her interference.

Banerjee’s production offers a sympathetic portrayal of a mother and daughter so often described in simplistic terms as overbearing and fragile respectively. Somerville’s enthralling performance of a woman wounded by the abandonment of her selfish husband weaves tenderness into her character, whose need for control and instinct for survival merely reflect the precarious era – especially for women. Refreshingly, Laura’s glass animal collection is portrayed more as a quirk than a sad hobby. In a visually stunning dancing scene with Jim O’Connor (Zacchaeus Kayode) where she accidentally breaks one of the animals, Laura is – to our surprise – rather unbothered by it, indicating that she is not as delicate as she is made out to be.

Rosanna Vize’s minimalist staging might raise doubt at first, but ultimately proves to be remarkably effective. Set on a circular platform where the characters have ample space to move around, they still manage to collide in each other’s spaces. It fittingly represents a family trapped in destructive patterns, as well as the complexities of love and loyalty that will always draw them together. The bare staging, complemented by Lee Curran’s dim lighting, creates a hazy liminal aesthetic that adds sentimental depth to the production.

Familial tensions never seem to dampen the humour dispersed throughout. From Amanda’s shrill “Rise and Shine!” calls every morning, delivered with an optimism that makes Tom envy the dead, to Laura’s dry-wit confessions like how she dropped out of business school because it gave her indigestion, the play finds its comedy in the tragedy of the human condition.

Characters embrace the modernity of jeans and trainers, while Amanda’s old-fashioned attire stays true to the 1930s, another nod to her soulful determination to hold her household together through changes out of her grasp. While leaning into its historical backdrop could’ve interrogated the politics of “home” more thoughtfully, the play, unanchored by any particular time period, lays bare our own personal glass menageries that we escape into, perhaps too often.

Ruweyda Sheik Ali

The Glass Menagerie is at Alexandra Palace Theatre from 22^nd May until 1^st June 2024. For further information or to book visit the theatre’s website here.

Watch the trailer for The Glass Menagerie here: