The Glass Menagerie

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Play closed 19 May 2007

Apollo Theatre Shaftesbury Avenue, London

A major revival of Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie starring Jessica Lange in a new production directed by Rupert Goold with designs by Matthew Wright. The Glass Menagerie is set in a St Louis slum, where a crippled girl lives with her family, her collection of glass animals... and her memories.

"I have my glass collection - Little articles of it, they're ornaments mostly. Most of them are little animals made out of glass, the tiniest little animals in the world. Mother calls them a glass menagerie! Here's an example of one, if you'd like to see it. Oh, be careful — if you breathe, it breaks!" - Laura Wingfield

"Rupert Goold's dream-struck production of The Glass Menagerie convinces me this is one of the great, unhappy family-life plays in the modern American repertoire... Magical"
The London Evening Standard

The cast for this production of Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie in London features Jessica Lange as 'Amanda Wingfield', Amanda Hale as 'Laura Wingfield', Ed Stoppard as 'Tom Wingfield' and Mark Umbers as 'Jim O'Connor', the Gentleman Caller.

"Rupert Goold's sensitive revival" The Times

The mother, Amanda Wingfield, is a little woman of great but confused vitality, who clings frantically to another time and place. Having failed to establish contact with reality, she continues to live vitally in her illusions. Her daughter, Laura Wingfield, has been left crippled by a childhood illness, with one leg shorter than the other, and held in a brace. Stemming from this, Laura's separation increases till she is like a piece of her own glass collection, too exquisitely fragile to move from the shelf. Amanda's son, Tom Wingfield, is the Narrator of the play. He is a poet with a job in a warehouse. His nature is not remoreless, but to escape from a trap he has to act without pity. Into this family comes the 'gentleman caller', Jim O'Connor - a nice, ordinary, young man.

"The hotshot young director Rupert Goold stages a superbly judged production... everything works gloriously... a great play has been magnificently revived" The Daily Telegraph

"Everyone in The Glass Menageria feels stifled and imprisoned, a point Rupert Goold's superbly atmospheric revival underlines in the design, which makes a prison of the shabby apartment, oppressively enclosed by a fire escape and deprived of light... The climatic candlelit scene almost breaks your heart... When Jim leaves, and Laura blows out the candles, it is as if all the light in her life has gone out for ever." The Mail on Sunday

"Rupert Goold brings the shadowy world of The Glass Menagerie to life with sympathy"
The Financial Times

"The play has more than [an] autobiographical tinge to it, and as the son, Tom/Tennessee, who dreams of breaking free, Ed Stoppard broods self-effacingly from the sidelines. But it is Mark Umbers, as Laura's gentleman caller, who sets the thing alight. Handsome and in command of his swaggering yet disappointed character, he is the most memorable thing about this cramped, self-conscious production." The Sunday Times

"Amanda Hale's pale, gawky Laura has a lovely luminous gentleness and her candlelit tete-a-tete with Mark Umbers' Jim is unforgettably tender, humorous and tragic. They are the real stars of this production and he beautifully captures the ex-golden boy's complex mix of lingering arrogance and deep kindness, truly falling in love with Laura for one life-enhancing but also devastating moment." The Independent on Sunday

"Jessica Lange, graceful even when poured into a ballgown that looks like a lampshade, is the box-office draw of Rupert Goold's enthralling production of The Glass Menagerie. But she's not the best bit... Rupert Goold, whose productions are always heady, is the perfect director for this audacious, florid, lacerated dramatist... It's hard to imagine the central episode more memorably rendered... How wonderful to see a play that scours the human heart, but also ironises it." The Observer

"Yes, I have tricks in my pocket, I have things up my sleeve. But I am the opposite of the stage magician. He gives you illusion that has the appearance of truth. I give you the truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion. To begin with, I turn back time. I reverse it to that quaint period, the thirties, when the huge middle class of America was matriculating in a school for the blind. Their eyes had failed them, or they had failed their eyes, and so they were having their fingers pressed forcibly down on the fiery Braille alphabet of a dissolving economy... 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. He is the most realistic character in the play, being an emissary from a world of reality that we were somehow set apart from. But since I have a poet's weakness for symbols, I am using this character also as a symbol; he is the long-delayed but always expected something that we live for..." - Tom Wingfield's opening speech, addressed directly to the audience.

Tennessee Williams on The Glass Menagerie: "The idea for The Glass Menagerie came very slowly - I think I worked on The Glass Menagerie longer than any other play. I didn't think it would be produced. I wasn't writing it for that purpose. I wrote it first as a short story called 'Portrait of a Girl in Glass', which is, I believe, one of my best stories. I guess The Glass Menagerie grew out of the intense emotions I felt seeing my sister's mind begin to go... We were in Chicago for three and a half months with The Glass Menagerie. We opened in December 1944, and played until mid-March... Menagerie got to New York in 1945. It was sold out three and a half months before it opened. People would stop off in New York to see it because they knew it was a new kind of theatre."