The first show I remember seeing at the Yard Theatre was called Manga Sister and was a 40-minute micro opera about a samurai going nuts at an old people’s home. I liked it a lot. But it’s fair to say that Hackney Wick’s only theatre has come a long way in the 14 years since then, as it closes the doors of its original building not with a fringe curio but a revival of Tennessee Williams’s greatest play The Glass Menagerie.
Yard artistic director Jay Miller is not a man afraid to throw out a lot of ideas and see what sticks, and it took a while for me to settle into his revival, which eschews period detail in favour of a dreamy no place chased by contemporary music (notably John Maus’s gorgeously elegiac Hey Moon), where everyone is kitted out is strange, luxuriant, beautiful costumes courtesy of ‘Lambdog1066’ (probably not their real name but so what if it is).
And yet Miller has a clear and lucid plan for it. The ’30s-set 1944 drama, based on Williams’s own family, tends to depict aging Southern belle Amanda Wingfield as a suffocating force of nature whose overbearing love has ruined the lives of her children, Tom (probably gay) and Laura (probably disabled).
Miller upends this. Sharon Small’s Amanda is ultimately a decent sort: if the engine of the play is her relationship with her troubled son, then here Small and Tom Varey’s charmingly battered Tom (he kind of looks like ‘70s Dylan) laugh together as much as they argue. She is reined in, a carefully modulated performance that ups Amanda’s empathy without sacrificing her poignancy. At the beginning Tom declares the play to be a memory – Miller pushes this by breaking Williams’s text into micro scenes wherein Amanda’s excesses are somewhat diluted. Rather than the play’s narrative being a hazily defined but implicitly continuous, here time obviously skips around, with Tom remembering an argument with his mother one minute and then next recalling a shared cigarette, the time skipping allowing for the heat to be turned down rapidly.
Probably Miller’s boldest innovation, however, is to reframe Laura as autistic. Not profoundly so, but it’s clear from the ear protectors she wears at the beginning that it’s the case, and frankly it makes a lot of sense of her behaviour - the shyness, the difficulty in dealing with the unexpected and new people… and of course the collection of glass animals she meticulously dotes over. It somewhat plays against the cues of Williams’s text, but not irreconcilably so and certainly makes more sense than her usual diagnosis of ‘very shy’ (the play was written a year after the term autism was coined and decades before there was widespread knowledge of it). In her stage debut Eva Morgan is tremendous – her Laura is a sweet dreamer whose ’shyness’ does feel like it can be overcome.
Where usually Amanda’s suffocating, deluded influence is the shaping factor in the trio’s lives, here it’s very clearly the others’ concern for Laura. Tom and Amanda are desperately concerned somebody can be found to look after Laura before they move on with their lives and it looks like that might happen when Jad Sayegh’s Jim comes to dinner; when she finally opens up to him it feels like a genuine meeting of minds, a hopeful vision of a different future.
Miller cleverly employs a degree of ambiguity about when any of this is happening – it’s possible to accept that this is both the stated 1930s and a time much further into the future. There’s no reason Tom couldn’t be looking at this from decades later, the details warped and blurred by memory and regret. Lambdog1066’s beautiful costumes would seem to represent how Tom feels about each of them more than how he remembers them. Laura is a sad clown in an elegant Pierrot costume; Tom a lumpen jester; the Gentleman Caller an eerily perfect store mannequin; Amanda in bizarrely deconstructed shards of faded gold.
Miller has more ideas than he strictly needs and a couple are a bit annoying - mixing in snippets of Shakespeares Sister’s 1992 smash Stay on what are presumably purely the grounds that the Gentleman Caller refers to Laura as ‘Shakespeare’s sister’ is definitely groan inducing.
But let him have his fun. If Miller’s style defaults to visually eye-popping and sonically excessive, then that shouldn’t distract from the fact he’s come up with a beautifully humane read on this classic, one that would still hit home even if this was staged as a trad period piece.
If this really was it from the Yard then it would be going out on a high. As it is, the theatre will be back in a new building next year, which is great because it feels like it’s just hitting its stride.
