Citizens Theatre, Glasgow 3 stars Tennessee Williams would’ve loved Glee. In many ways, the hothouse largesse of Williams’ first big hit isn’t that far removed from the camp archness, lacerating one-liners and everyday tragedies of the latest teen TV sensation. This is especially the case in Polly Teale’s touring production, a collaboration between Shared Experience and Salisbury Playhouse that heightens the hand-me-down neuroses of faded southern belle Amanda Wingfield and her troubled brood to the nth degree. Teale opens things with Williams’ autobiographical narrator Tom sporting a smoking jacket at his typewriter and speaking in an affected drawl, already a reconstructed man of letters looking back with rose-tinted sentimentalism rather than anger. Where Tom is emotionally crippled, his sister Laura is physically so. Both find escape routes from the smothering presence of their deserted and disappointed mother, though as the film projections of the long-ago dances that contrast wi
An archive of arts writing by Neil Cooper. Effete No Obstacle.