Review The Glass Menagerie

A  fine revival sheds fresh light  for reviewer Francis Beckett on the fragile mother and daughter relationship in a landmark 20th century American play.

The Glass Menagerie
by Tennessee Williams 

Lost Horizon
http://www.atgtickets.com/venues/duke-of-yorks/

Tennessee Williams's classic memory play The Glass Menagerie is, as director John Tiffany says,  "pure heartache and pure craft".

Technically it is a perfect play, minutely observed, occurring in one claustrophobic space. Small things, that are to make a difference at the end, are unobtrusively seeded at the start: the glass animal collection; the charm of the man we are to meet in the second act. The plot hangs together. There are no moments which make you think afterwards "I don't quite believe that".

In 1930s' St Louis, Missouri, on the banks of the Mississippi, lives former southern belle Amanda, deserted years ago by her drunken husband. Living with her are her two adult children: Tom, who works in a local warehouse and hates it, but cannot leave because the family depends on the small income he earns; and Laura, the disabled and chronically shy daughter.

Amanda knows that the only way to secure her daughter's future in a society which does not value women, especially shy women with ungainly legs, is to make sure she is well married. When Tom finally agrees to invite a workmate home, it seems to Amanda that her prayers have been answered.

She works on the project of getting her daughter married with all the dedication, unselfishness and blind obsessiveness that Jane Austen's Mrs Bennett puts into the same project. In fact, Mrs Bennett, transferred to another century and another continent, would have been very like Amanda. (I mean that as a compliment, as I happen to think Mrs Bennett has been traduced by most people who have written about her, including her creator.)

And it is the actor playing Amanda upon whom this play hinges. If she convinces, so will the play. Cherry Jones convinces in spades. You can see just what drives her; what it has taken to bring up two children by herself in that society, and how it has drained her; why she is what she is; and why she is slowly, but surely, driving her beloved children away. Jones puts in a truly magnificent performance.

She provides several wonderful moments, but two of them stick in my mind. One is when she learns there is to be a gentleman caller whom she can hope her daughter may charm, and she suddenly sees her dismal, cheaply-furnisheed apartment through the eyes she expects him to bring to it. The other is when the gentleman caller arrives, and she cannot stop talking to him - or selling her duaghter's charms as though she is selling soap flakes.

Amanda is based on the playwright's mother and Tom on the playwright himself. Michael Esper puts in a fine performance as Tom, dreams clashing with duty, and Kate O'Flynn is heartbreakingly good as the shy, crippled Laura. The scene where her mother insists she answers the door to the gentleman caller shows us in just a few seconds the ways in which we kill the spirit of those we love the most: both women are slowly stifling each other.

Brian J Smith, the gentleman caller, is also a pure delight: an amusing, popular, handsome, thoroughly decent young man, wishing his fellow human beings nothing but good, knowing in the end, to his utter distress, he has only done harm.

John Tiffany's direction of the four-strong cast is neatly understated, but I was not at all sure about designer Bob Crowley's set. There was a kind of tower which, I think, was supposed to signify higher landings in a high-rise apartment block, but only suggested to me a castle in Fairyland; and there was also a puzzling dumb show.

But this is a small criticism. Tiffany's The Glass Menagerie is a wholly convincing, moving, sensitive production of one of the great plays of the 20th century.I urge you to go and see it. A green light from me.

Review The Emperor

The Emperor 
Adapted by Colin Teevan
From The Book By Ryszard Kapuściński

Pictures At An Exhibition
http://www.youngvic.org/

At the start of The Emperor, s delicate verse adaptation by Colin Teevan of Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuściński's 1975 literary reportage, we hear a rippling melody picked out on the strings of the Krar, the Ethiopian lyre.

The writing is literally on the wall when projected letters unravel, picked out to the beat of typewriter keys. "Kapuściński's intention was 'to recover pictures doomed to destruction, to make an exhibition of the old art of govverning'.

This two hander with Kathryn Hunter and Temesgen Zeleke (who plays the lyre and percussion, as well as army and student rebels), and presumably Kapuściński's book The Emperor, has an almost fable like quality in its ironies and humour. 

The archaic rhythms of the hierachical  Ethiopian court and attempt to rule with Aristolian purity are contrasted with the post Second World War world of international politics, implied social insurance, corruption in the form of a modern financial paper trail and a new educated generation influenced by Communism.

Hunter plays twelve characters interviewed by Kapuściński, maintaining a ricketty structure, underpinned by Japanese investment and foreign capital in the form of development aid,  holding up the Lion of Judah. The last of the imperial dynasty Haile Selassi was supposedly descended from the biblical King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba and ruled  Ethiopia until his "dethronement" in the latter half of the twentieth centry.

Yet every one of the court associates and flunkies in their outsize military uniforms and epaulets can be seen as one aspect of the elusive, unseen character of the frail, tiny ruler Haile Selassie. Simultaneously every one may be some aspect of the writer Kapuściński, another unseen character.

At the same time the testimonies of the court functionaries also reveal with fine brushstrokes how western politics and finance was reflected back and entangled in Ethiopia's uneasy mix. That is to say the "development without reform", the God-like, out of touch status of the Emperor, the army as royal bodyguards but then rebels, the poverty and famine  afflicting the Horn of Africa country.

Echoing the final days of the court of Louis XVI, the last Tsar of Russia and the Chinese Emperors, the piece in its measured poetic form has the feel of a deceptively gentle Candide or, perhaps more aptly, Rasselas satire. Most of all, Kapuściński himself was a journalist reporting back to and having to negotiate the potentially fatal (for him) internal and external intricacies of the Polish Soviet satellite state. 

Walter Meierjohann directs in a black box stage designed by Ti Green with the simplest of props: A couple of chairs,a walking stick, a wooden throne. red and gold cushions, a silk handkerchief. Hunter buttons and unbuttons an army jacket with removeable epaulets and dons a chauffeur's large peaked cap, scholarly glasses, a pair of shades as she metamorphoses from one character to another. 

The soundscape by Paul Arditta includes a jaunty brass band, the racket of building as the international development money flows in, the murmuring of discontents and the drumming of the rain.  

Running until September 24 at the Young Vic before transferring to Manchester's Home and then on to Luxembourg, the play does not stint on the ambiguities of the power play of the Western powers. It also simply and effectively emphasizes the mixed motives of the journalism which proved one of the major catalysts for the overthrow of the Imperial leader as the hacks cry at a press conference, "We don't want development, we want famine!". 

There is just a hint that this play wishes to spread its tendrils further than the years of The Emperor's reign and fall. For as the Minister of Information says to his dissident university student son, "For you, Hailu, there exists only the twentieth century,/Or this twenty first century/In which you say blessed justice will reign!"

This was a nation caught between an ancient feudal set up and both a willingness to play a role on  while being dragged onto the world stage. If a direct quote from Kapuściński (we haven't read his book), the immuring of Haile Selassie from the poverty of his subjects takes on a deepened meaning in our financial times:

"But in a poor country?/Money is a thing of wonder/ Money is a thick hedge, always in bloom/It separates you from everything else,/Through that hedge you can't see poverty,/Nor smell the human misery,/Nor hear the cries of the hopeless masses.

The art of governing, mentioned from the first, and the fate of empires, according to Aristotle, depends on the education of youth. Yet the elite of Ethiopia found their own children in the university refusing to be distracted by the city girls in hotel bars dressed in mini skirts "like Jane Fonda" or the music of the Rolling Stones. In the end, the elders have to be protected from stones launched by their own children.

This is a play exquisitely done. And yet, as the introduction to the printed text by Richard Reid of the School of African and Oriental Studies points out, the Kapuściński source material is not "unproblematical" (we assume in its double edged agenda coming from a Polish journalist at a certain point in history). 

While Teevan mentions the 21st century, the exploration of journalism and  Kapuściński's role seems just a little too lightly drawn for this version of The Emperor to make it distinct enough from that of Jonathan Miller and Michael Hastings at The Royal Court before the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Still, it's an engrossing 100 minutes with a book and play which attempts to crystallize the nature of ancient hierarchies in a modern world and it's an amber/green light from TLT and her own little valet de théâtre.