The Glass Menagerie review astonishing refresh upturns a delicate classic

Royal Exchange, Manchester
Making dynamic use of a sparse stage and a spinning neon sign, Atri Banerjee’s adventurous production gives new shape to Tennessee Williams’ play

You mess with The Glass Menagerie at your peril. Although experimental in form, with its tang of European expressionism and its dreamlike treatment of memory, the Tennessee Williams classic is as delicate as one of Laura Wingfield’s glass animals. Nothing is out of place.

And yet director Atri Banerjee does something astonishing. He takes this 80-year-old play, dusts it down and turns it inside out. Rather than damage it, he lets us see its tale of thwarted desire afresh.

It is not only in his non-naturalistic staging, although that is a big part of it. Rosanna Vize’s abstract set is empty but for 14 speakers, a few chairs and the almost invisible glass collection. Above the actors’ heads, the word “paradise” circles in neon, its pace slowing and quickening according to the momentum of the play. It is the name of the ballroom across the street, but presented like this, with a nod to artist Martin Creed, it is a bitter reminder of the unattainable.

Working with movement director Anthony Missen, the actors make dynamic use of this space, positioning themselves angsty distances apart and addressing the audience as much as each other. Free and fluid, they give physical shape to the play’s emotional tug of war.

So far so European art house, but Banerjee also upturns assumptions about the characters. Geraldine Somerville plays Amanda Wingfield not as some deranged southern belle, but as a caring, if overly attentive, mother; her reasoning sound, her manner pleasant. Likewise, Rhiannon Clements plays Laura without the conventional fragility. She holds her own in clashes with her mother, even as she matches the description of “being different” accorded to her by Eloka Ivo’s Jim O’Connor in the magnificent, heart-breaking duet that crowns the show.

“Being different” is what characterises the whole family in Banerjee’s vision. They are not dysfunctional so much as out of place, which is equally true of Joshua James as a smart, sardonic Tom, a man who loses his job for writing poetry on a shoebox. When he gives his sister a scarf with rainbow stripes, it feels like a queer-culture reference to her outsider status, in a production that is as intelligent as it is adventurous.

• At Royal Exchange, Manchester, until 8 October
  

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