OBSERVER: Glass Menagerie
In a tale of two halves, Running with Scissors Theatre and Victory People Productions put on a production of uneven quality of Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie at the The Stables in North Melbourne’s Meat Market.
The play started with one of the characters, Tom Wingfield, setting the scene as he reminisced about living with his mother Amanda and elder sister Laura in a cramped St Louis, Missouri, apartment in the Great Depression. Various scenes of family life then unfolded, revealing the challenges the three family members faced living in such desperate and uncertain times.
Written as a one-act play with seven scenes, The Glass Menagerie is described as a memory play and has strong autobiographical elements (with Tom being a thinly-veiled Tennessee).
This production divided the play into two parts with an intermission. While not uncommon, this way of delivering the play broke the story’s momentum. In addition, Williams’s writing could be flowery at times as well as preachy with regards to Tom’s (that is, his) situation.
The play’s four characters were played by Oliver Gorringe (Tom), Linda Cookson (Amanda), Caitlin Mccallig (Laura) and Columbus Lane (Tom and Laura’s old high school friend Jim O’Connor). All did a fine job of establishing their characters in the first half of the production. However, performances were more melodramatic and less convincing in the second half.
Splitting the one-act play into two acts was a choice of the directors Nicholas Reynolds and Nadia Sirninger-Rankin. They did a wonderful job of creating a languid sultry atmosphere in the first half using a measured leisurely tempo of story-telling. However, post-intermission this same tempo seemed ill-suited to the heated passions and raised stakes of the second half action which, subsequently, was laboured.
Something of a mixed bag then, this production of an American theatre classic.
A first half that was engaging followed by a second half that was somewhat stilted, strained and overwrought.
Venue: Meat Market Stables, 2 Wreckyn St, North Melbourne
Review by Peter Murphy