This Adams family dims a Hollywood star
The Glass Menagerie (Duke of York’s Theatre, London) Verdict: Semi-enchanted ★★★☆☆
AMY ADAMS is the actress who found fame falling to Earth as the princess-inwaiting in the 2007 Disney film Enchanted. Now she’s fallen to Earth again — this time landing with a bump — in the West End revival of Tennessee Williams’s autobiographical drama The Glass Menagerie.
As in the film, where she grapples with the hostilities of New York City while wearing a glittery princess dress, Adams enjoys decidedly mixed fortunes, thanks to Jeremy Herrin’s glumly undistinguished production.
Her role is that of Amanda Wingfield, the single mother of burgeoning writer Tom (the Williams character) and his painfully shy, disabled sister Laura, in the St Louis of the 1930s.
Abandoned by her husband and fearful for the future of her children, Amanda’s quietly desperate hectoring needs to take charge of the stage — especially in her frantic mission to find a husband for Laura.
Perhaps initially inhibited by a frumpy brown frock that might better serve as a carpenter’s apron, Adams, in her West End debut, never quite manages to press her personality on the situation. Nor does she generate the claustrophobia against which Tom eventually rebels.
She’s too easily dominated by Tom Glynn-Carney as the fiery son who is fed up with his dead-end job at a local shoe warehouse. It’s not until Adams gets to wear a fairytale Southern belle dress in the second half that she seems set free to weave her charms — twirling her gown and flirting with her daughter’s ‘gentleman caller’.
UNTIL then, Herrin’s production feels stubbornly immune to the play’s melancholy poetry, which evokes such gorgeous images as ‘eyes like wood smoke in autumn’.
The most magical feature of Vicki Mortimer’s set is the museum display cabinet for Laura’s titular zoo of animal figurines. Otherwise, the stage is besieged by a clutter of lights and furniture, beneath a huge screen showing clunky projections of symbolic images including a lovers’ crescent moon. One particular faux pas even has the fastidious Amanda sitting on her kitchen table — and that ungainly prop is, anyway, a charcoal-black cage, later relieved by a linen cloth.
Adams faces competition from Lizzie Annis’s unusually vigorous Laura, who, despite being a shrinking violet, towers over her mother as if about to swallow her up.
Annis, who has cerebral palsy, is also making her West End debut, and is the first disabled actor I’ve heard of playing this role in a major production. And a very assured debut it is, too. Racked by acute embarrassment, she is sweetly teased from her shyness by Victor
Alli as the gentleman caller. It’s a lovely intimate scene, where they seem briefly made for each other as Alli’s warm condescension allows her — and us — to dream for a moment.
As Laura’s brother, GlynnCarney is angry, boozy and less forgiving in his boorish treatment of his mother. Yet it’s a role where we also need to feel his character’s guilt. Thankfully, Paul Hilton secures the play’s sentimental through-line as the older Williams who, acting as narrator, patrols the stage like a vagrant and seems to conjure up the action.
Hilton also has a subtler feel for the agonies of Williams’s dreamy vernacular — including one line about how ‘time is the longest distance between two places’. That one always chokes me up.