The Glass Menagerie
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...