The narrator tells us up front: “The play is memory. Being a memory play, it is dimly lighted, it is sentimental, it is not realistic….I am the narrator of the play and also a character in it. The other characters are my mother, Amanda, my sister Laura, and a gentleman caller who appears in the final scenes.” The narrator is Tom, an aspiring writer who is trapped in the “living death” of a job in a shoe factory and the claustrophobia of life in a small apartment in a tenement in St Louis with his mother and sister. The play which Tom narrates, and plays his part in, consists of a series of snapshots of the family’s life back in 1938, filtered through the emotional lens of Tom’s memory. The play is very much “a picture of my own heart”, as its author Tennessee Williams said about the intent of all of his play writing, and in this case it is a particularly personal portrait of Williams’ own family. The Glass Menagerie was Tennessee Williams’s breakthrough, opening in March 1945 on Broadway to rave reviews, and its box office success catapulted its 34-year old author to fame and fortune, a status affirmed two years later with the Broadway success of his most famous play A Streetcar Named Desire.
The Glass Menagerie is now a standard on educational curricula and in perennial theatrical revivals, loved for its heart wrenching portrayal of the hopes and disappointments of this flawed family, and admired for its theatrical technique and poetic dramatic language. The play was brilliantly staged in 2013 on Broadway in a production directed by John Tiffany, which was revived in 2017 in London’s West End, with Cherry Jones repeating her role as Amanda, and Kate O’Flynn giving an ethereal performance as Laura. I am absolutely delighted to be joined in this episode by the director John Tiffany to share his insights into this enduring classic.
