Up above a video screen, designer Ash J Woodward projects images, of the glass ornaments distorted and merging. To the left of the stage are large film lights and studio paraphernalia as if this play is a recording, underlying its importance as a memory play. However Vicki Mortimer’s set design puts them centre stage in a larger than life glass cabinet case with very large glass sculptures which hits an incongruous note. But for Laura Wingfield (Lizzie Annis), singled out for her physical disability here, they are her life. The glass menagerie of the title are delicate tiny glass animals that I was too clumsy to care for as a child because they broke so easily. Jeremy Herrin directs this production at the Duke of York’s with American movie star Amy Adams as the Williams matriarch, Amanda Wingfield. She is in Suddenly Last Summer and Summer and Smoke and when we see Blanche Dubois leaving her sister’s home in Streetcar for life in an institution, this is based on Rose. She had schizophrenia and in 1943 when she was 24 her mother authorised a lobotomy. Rose’s character haunts many of Williams’s plays. The Glass Menagerie is the play which takes most detail from Thomas Lanier Williams’s own early life in St Louis and is about his sister Rose. Plays like A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roofand this one The Glass Menagerie may be the best known. Tennessee Williams is widely regarded as one of the three most important American 20th century playwrights.
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