Tennessee William’s first great success, The Glass Menagerie is the latest offering from the Melbourne Theatre Company’s 2004 season. First published in 1945, it is a ‘memory play’, told through the eyes of Tom Wingfield (Ben Mendelsohn) as he remembers the events that led him to walk out of his home, leaving his mother Amanda (Gillian Jones) and sister Laura (Pia Miranda). Set in 1937 in St Louis, the play is in part autobiographical. Tennessee was christened Thomas, spent his teenage years in St Louis living with his mother and sister, both of whom were unstable and his father was absent much of the time. Indeed, in his production notes Williams himself states, ‘Nostalgia … is the first condition of the play’.
The Glass Menagerie presents the audience with a subtle yet powerful look at the way people can confuse, or indeed refuse to accept reality, choosing to live in a world of illusion. Although the Wingfield family are bound to each other by the weak relationships of their reality, they choose to escape into their own world of fantasy and illusion. Set against the backdrop of America during the Depression, the drama of the play is not so much in the action but in the way each of the characters elects to deal with the hardships in their lives.
Melbourne Theatre Company’s director Kate Cherry and designer Dale Ferguson have been faithful to Williams’ ideas and have presented a most intriguing and thoughtful version of this work. While the Wingfield apartment dominates the centre stage—light carefully focused on the table that holds Laura’s collection of fragile glass animals, the photo of the father and husband who abandoned them constantly illuminated on the wall above—our attention is also drawn to the fire escape stairs outside the front door leading, it seems, to anywhere but here. It is the escape that Tom eventually takes.
Ben Mendelsohn handles the dual role of the older, narrator Tom and the younger, angry and trapped Tom, competently and perceptively. As a young man, Tom withdraws from the reality of having to work at a factory to support his mother and sister, by turning to writing poetry, ‘going to the movies’ and drinking late into the night. The older Tom, is a playwright conveying, even justifying to himself more than anyone else, the reasons why he left.
Gillian Jones, as the faded southern belle Amanda, gives a performance that