The Yard Theatre finishes its fourteen-year existence in its existing building with a stylistically adventurous production of Tennessee Williams’s memory play The Glass Menagerie.
Tom (Tom Varey), standing to one side of the stage, tells us he is taking us back to “the thirties, when the huge middle class of America was matriculating in a school for the blind. Their eyes had failed them, or they had failed their eyes, and so they were having their fingers pressed forcibly down on the fiery Braille alphabet of a dissolving economy.”
It was a time when he worked as a shoe salesman while living in a cramped apartment with his mother Amanda (Sharon Small) and sister Laura. His father “was a telephone man who fell in love with long distances; he gave up his job with the telephone company and skipped the light fantastic out of town.”
However, his image fills a full wall, though their only contact from him after he left came via a postcard “containing a message of two words: ‘Hello—Goodbye!’ and no address.”
Director Jay Miller and his company sensitively evoke the lyrical style of the language, the fragility of the characters and the implicit humour of many of the scenes.
The particularly effective lighting design by Sarah Readman has a cinematic shading, shifting us into occasional moments of semi-darkness. At times, figures wander the background or stand in mysterious poses by the fire door. The “noirish” mood of the lighting can convey the cramped, frustrated lives of the characters. However, the mood becomes almost magically reassuring in the candlelit scene where the shy Laura cautiously opens up to the charismatic “gentleman caller” Jim, dancing with him and even warmly responding to a kiss.
The one element of that scene which doesn’t quite work is the way Jim (Jad Sayegh) and Laura (Eva Morgan) suddenly shift into a jaunty dance sequence in which each of their movements is mirrored by the other.
But then this is a production with many curious stylistic elements. Take the set. Behind the couch, various objects from an old phone to a flower are scattered on a huge, grey, rocky-looking mound.
A wardrobe serves as a place where Amanda can rest. She also stands inside it making mobile phone calls to potential subscribers for a magazine, her words being deliberately distorted by amplification so we can’t really follow them. Laura uses the wardrobe as a hiding place. Even Tom can at times be spotted emerging from it.
Tom, our occasional narrator, often wanders the shadows at the back of the stage, at one point having a jolly dance with Jim.
Wearing a head torch, he will roam, perhaps painting a wall. In the final moments of the play, he runs out of the fire door and then, having circled the back of the theatre space, runs back in across the stage from the other side, repeating the circuit four or five times.
The actors give a clear, thoughtful performance, but we can occasionally be distracted by Josh Anio Grigg’s intense, at times quite loud soundscape.
The show is a bit of a wild journey that at times doesn’t quite convey the power of one of the greatest plays of the twentieth century, but it is always entertainingly watchable.
Reviewer: Keith Mckenna