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 with the westerns of Tom’s imagination indicate, she too is a dreamer.
In a production of some very different choices than is usual, Imogen Stubbs’ Amanda is a flamboyant pot-pourri of highly-strung girlishness who lost her youth too soon. In the crucial dinner party scene with the Gentleman Caller, she flirts with the unconscious zeal of a middle-aged divorcee let off the leash for the first time in yonks. Even with movement choreographed by Liz Ranken, however, for a show already mid-tour, there’s an odd lack of energy and pace at play. This despite the self-deluding vim Kyle Soller invests Gentlemen Caller Jim with. The extended scene with Emma Lowndes’ Laura may still be littered with pathos, but it’s still not enough to give Patrick Kennedy’s flight as Tom the urgent air required.
The Herald, April 29th 2010
ends
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 with the westerns of Tom’s imagination indicate, she too is a dreamer.
In a production of some very different choices than is usual, Imogen Stubbs’ Amanda is a flamboyant pot-pourri of highly-strung girlishness who lost her youth too soon. In the crucial dinner party scene with the Gentleman Caller, she flirts with the unconscious zeal of a middle-aged divorcee let off the leash for the first time in yonks. Even with movement choreographed by Liz Ranken, however, for a show already mid-tour, there’s an odd lack of energy and pace at play. This despite the self-deluding vim Kyle Soller invests Gentlemen Caller Jim with. The extended scene with Emma Lowndes’ Laura may still be littered with pathos, but it’s still not enough to give Patrick Kennedy’s flight as Tom the urgent air required.
The Herald, April 29th 2010
ends
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