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4 hours ago
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Tennessee Williams’ semi-autobiographical “memory play” is sentimental by its nature. Memory takes poetic licence and is “seated predominantly in the heart”, Williams tells us in his opening. This production shows us how poetic it can be but also how nightmarish and tormenting.
Exquisitely directed by Jay Miller, the story of pained family love between narrator Tom Wingfield (Tom Varey), who aspires to be a poet, his emotionally fragile sister, Laura (Eva Morgan), who has a limp that is not visible here, and their domineering mother, Amanda (Sharon Small), is dimly lit but strikingly shorn of sentimentality.
Memories light up like photographic flashes out of the darkness or appear like waking dreams. Characters stand momentarily frozen, scenes are accompanied by music, as Tom tells us memories so often are, and Josh Anio Grigg’s compositions are electronic, echoing, ambient and anxious.
The characters are supremely rendered: you feel the sense of trapped life and necessary illusion in this household: Tom, forced to be the breadwinner in a dead-end warehouse job and living out his dreams at the movies; Amanda, stuck in a lost past of southern comforts, gentlemen callers and, it is hinted, plantation slavery; Laura, desperate in her quietness, obsessed with her glass collection and looking like a delicate butterfly in net and frills (the costumes by Lambdog1066 are gorgeously caught between reality and fantasy).
There is heat and violence from the lighting for the mother-son clashes and candlelight when Laura’s “gentleman caller” Jim O’Connor (Jad Sayegh) comes round for dinner. Morgan emanates such pained shyness that you feel Laura’s light-headed fear while Sayegh emanates his character’s carefree – and careless – nature. The scene of building intimacy between them is utterly beautiful and devastating.
The space itself is a limbo between reality, memory and fantasy. Cécile Trémolières’ stage design simultaneously captures the inside and outside of the Wingfields’ home, and has realist edges that melt into expressionism: a wardrobe that seems like a visual metaphor for a Narnia-style fantasy and repressed desire (characters come in and out of the closet). There are diaphanous curtains and shabby chic furniture along with Laura’s glass menagerie, which twirls like a multi-tiered cake platter above her phonograph.
An otherworldly beauty is mixed with grit and grime, such as the mound of sand amid the furniture, sprinkled with glitter and with flowers growing in it. It is vaguely industrial, too, gesturing to the warehouse in which Tom works.
Sarah Readman’s lighting design is inspired, giving the production both its sense of sepia-tinted past and the nightmarish quality of a remembrance stewed with years of Tom’s regret for fleeing this stultifying home to find his freedom.
As the last production in this venue before it is demolished and rebuilt at twice its size, this is a fine send-off: a beautiful, disturbing, slow explosion of a tragedy.
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At the Yard theatre, London, until 10 May
