The Glass Menagerie

Dundee Rep

NEIL COOPER

WHEN actor Robbie Jack takes the microphone as Tennessee Williams’ s alter-ego Tom Wingfield at the start of Jemima Levick’s post-modern-tinged revival of Williams’s 1944 semi-autobiographical full-length debut, he could be the compere of some latter-day live-art confessional cabaret night, channelling the spirit of Lenny Bruce and Eric Bogosian.

As Jack signals for the blank wall of Alex Lowde’s clean-lined set to raise, it’s an unexpected beginning to an openly sentimental affair that’s more regularly gift-wrapped in traditional theatrical ribbons and bows.

Here, however, as type-written keywords from the script are projected above to signal moments within moments, the play becomes Tom’s work in progress, which he writes ever larger with every reenactment he conjures up in dreams haunted by his mother Amanda and sister Laura.

The Wingfield apartment may be small, but it provides an escape route for all. For Irene Macdougall’s Amanda, forever the disappointed débutante, it’s a catwalk that allows her to claim the spotlight, her every reverie sounding like a dress rehearsal for an acceptance speech. For Millie Turner’s Laura it’s a safehouse where, like any other socially anxious young person, she can lose herself in records and the fantasy of her glass animal collection.

While for Tom it’s both backstreet prison and unexpected, if somewhat guilt-wracked inspiration, even Thomas Cotran’s gentleman caller Jim seems to find himself anew there.

All dressed up with Joan Cleville’s little choreographic flourishes and RJ McConnell’s languid underscore for piano, clarinet and cello, Levick’s impressionistic and mould-breaking re-imagining of Williams’s poetic intentions is an exquisitely poignant construction that breathes fresh heartbreak into one of the saddest plays ever written.