The Glass Menagerie review: A new, neon light on Tennessee Williams’s play

Atri Banerjee’s long-awaited production at the Royal Exchange draws poignantly on the isolation of the past few years

Geraldine Somerville and Rhiannon Clements in ‘The Glass Menagerie’ (Marc Brenner)

At last, Atri Banerjee’s production of Tennessee Williams’s play sees the light: it was due to be staged in spring 2020. While the cast and team have re-assembled, Banerjee and designer Rosanna Vize completely reworked their plans, to take into account what we’ve all been through since then.

It’s true that this portrait of an isolated, claustrophobic family – stuck in a small St Louis flat but each really living within their own dream world – now has a freshly poignant tug on the old heartstrings. But the biggest change to this production appears to be the highly literal reminder of how the promise of a brighter life remains just out of reach for these characters: spinning above the action is a huge neon sign reading ‘PARADISE’. As well as an unignorable reminder of unfulfilled hope, it is also a concrete reference to the Paradise Dance Hall across the street – its music and illumination offering distraction for lives “without any change or adventure”. Lighting designer Lee Curran uses the sign, too, to re-enforce emotional states; it glows or dims, spinning faster or slower, in agitation, boredom or honeyed memory.

Set in 1937 and based on Williams’s own youth, The Glass Menagerie is declared in an introduction to be a “memory play”: the son, Tom, looks back on life with a painfully shy, disabled sister Laura and their overbearing, Southern Belle mother Amanda. Everyone is stifled. Tom wants to be a poet, but works in a warehouse; Amanda is obsessed with the lost glories of her youth and with finding a “gentleman caller” to marry Laura, while Laura retreats into old records and tending to her collection of tiny glass animals.