An absorbing revival of Tennessee Williams’ intense family drama The Glass Menagerie offers some strong performances as director Atri Banerjee tries to modernise a dated story.
Kingston’s Rose is the venue (until May 4) of this minimalist touring production which builds in tension and focus through a powerful second half to a curiously flat ending.
Along the way are strong acting displays by Geraldine Somerville as the mother, Amanda, and Zacchaeus Kayode as Jim, the possible fancy man for the shy, disabled daughter Laura (Natalie Kimmerling). Kasper Hilton-Hille plays son Tom, who also narrates at key points.

The glass menagerie in question is a clutch of tiny ornaments which Laura collects to create her own small world of escape.
Williams’ autobiographical play, written during the Second World War and set in the poor tenaments of central Saint Louis, Missouri, is a tragedy of its time.
Amanda desperately wants her painfully withdrawn daughter to find a man to marry, with Tom’s warehouse work colleague Jim in the frame. Laura’s anxiety (based on Williams’ own sister’s story) makes this a challenge.
In director Banerjee’s hands, the second half of the play explores that doomed courtship but tries, with only limited success, to make what began life as a claustrophobic 1940s one-room drama into a modern-day exploration of romance.
There’s a ‘sliding doors’ section, where we first see one idealised ending, set to pulsating music, then a second, downbeat ending.

But the entire concept of a mother’s tragicomic match-making efforts belong in a different era, and struggle to translate into anything relatable today. The crazy dream dance sequence and the jarring loud music simply doesn’t bridge that gap.
Glass Menagerie was Williams’ first stage success, and propelled him to stardom, including two Pulitzer prizes in a seven-year span.
The stark set of this travelling production at the Rose uses virtually no furniture, and only minimal props on a circular stage around a totem pole bearing the giant neon word Paradise – the ironically upbeat name of the dance club across the street.
However, Lee Curran’s masterful lighting design envelops the action like a fifth character, while Giles Thomas’s sound ratchets up the drama.
Yet despite the strength and passion of the cast, it’s hard to empathise with characters from an era when parental input played such an overwhelming, overpowering role in finding a life partner.
Tickets via rosetheatre.org