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The Glass Menagerie

Dundee Rep

Four stars


The past is everything in Tennessee Williams’ breakout play, first seen in 1944, but eighty years on as heartbreaking as it ever was in Dundee Rep’s new production. For its semi-autobiographical narrator Tom, it’s about trying to outrun that past and all its broken memories that linger, but failing at every turn. The only way to purge the demons chasing him, it seems, is to conjure them into life in the play we’re watching. 

 

For Tom’s mother Amanda and his work mate Jim, it’s about myth-making on past glories, now lost to lives of disappointment and under achievement. And for Tom’s sister Laura, her past has already shaped a future of lost dreams by being too terrified of herself to live. Like Laura’s glass ornaments that provide some kind of salvation, all four are on the verge of breaking into tiny pieces. 

 

As the lights go up on Christopher Jordan-Marshall’s Tom in Andrew Panton’s production, the blank canvas of his romanticised memories is coloured in by a quartet of actors who play off each other with an inherent musicality that comes directly from Williams’ words. This is brought home by Reuben Joseph’s live guitar score, played by Declan Spaine, who also appears as would-be gentleman caller Jim. 

 

Both Jordan-Marshall and Sara Stewart as a magnificent Amanda provide a deft lightness to their characters amongst the everyday tragedies that cause them to tear emotional chunks out of each other. Stewart especially inhabits Amanda’s overbearing largesse with a tragicomic depth of feeling. When she dresses up for Jim in an eye gouging bright yellow vintage dress, it may look like the result of an explosion in a birthday cake factory, but you don't know whether to laugh or cry.

 

Spaine brings a cocksure energy to Jim, while Amy Conachan’s Laura is refreshingly unfragile, and only needs to be treated like a grown up to draw her away from her records and ornaments. In her candlelit scene with Jim, time seems to slow right down. In control of all this, Jordan-Marshall’s Tom is no effete poet, but a bohemian night owl and beautiful loser in waiting. 

 

Presented in association with the Citizens Theatre, Glasgow and Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh, this is played out on Emily James’ black and white set with slow-burning grace. This is heightened by Simon Wilkinson’s low level lighting that lends things a suitably sepia tinged veneer. The result is a lingering dream state that hangs over Panton’s stately production of a play in which four shattered lives remain in a timeless limbo of the imagination. 


The Herald, October 6th 2025

 

Ends 

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