ROYAL LYCEUM, EDINBURGH
BARRY BOWHILL THEATRE, BY SELKIRK
A COUPLE of years ago, a touring production of Tennessee Williams's 1958 play Suddenly Last Summer arrived in Edinburgh from Sheffield Theatres, and – in a quiet sort
of way – took the stage of the King's Theatre by storm. The monstrous mother in Williams's drama was played by Diana Rigg, with a terrifying and ruthless stage presence. The decaying conservatory set leached a powerful sense of evil, a once-lush civilisation run rotten. And in Michael Grandage's production, Williams's story of a mother's lethal self-deception about her son's character, the nature of his private life, and the terrible circumstances of his death, was played out with an intensity that burned itself onto the mind.
This is how the drama of Tennessee Williams can be, when it's staged by a company that fully enters into the fierce sense of frustration and suffocation that fuels his work; and it's because there's little sign of that banked-up intensity in Jemima Levick's elegant Royal Lyceum revival of The Glass Menagerie that the show never quite reaches its full theatrical potential.
In a sense, Williams was the most radical of all the American playwrights who came to maturity during the Depression years of the 1930s, in that his homosexuality forced him to question the whole stuff of romantic narrative, and of the family structure on which American society was founded.
And although The Glass Menagerie – Williams's first great commercial and artistic success – is certainly an earlier and less radical play than Suddenly Last Summer, it still contains the outlines of that fierce historic struggle against conventional family morality, as the young narrator Tom – a would-be writer and adventurer, working as a warehouse clerk – describes the plight of his abandoned mother Amanda and his desperately shy and slightly disabled sister Laura, two vulnerable souls about to be left behind not only by the guilt-stricken Tom, but also by the onward rush of history itself.
The main problem with Levick's production, though, is that it resolutely refuses to delve a single inch beneath the relatively conventional surface of the narrative in order to reach this deep vein of historical and poetic resonance. Instead, it accepts Tom at face value as an ineffectual teenage dreamer; Amanda as a domineering, self-deceiving comedy mother; Laura as a sweet girl whose life is tragically wrecked by her failure to attract a husband – and the effect is both slightly bland, and slightly reactionary.
All of this is beautifully conveyed by Levick's gifted cast, in a display of the kind of British acting that graces our very best television comedy. Barbara Marten is brave and angry as Amanda; Nicola Harrison is tremblingly beautiful and sensitive as Laura; Joseph Arkley is suitably mulish and gawky as Tom; Antony Eden turns in a beautifully-pitched performance as the brash but kindly "gentleman caller"; and in a fine display of pace, the narrative unfolds with never a dull moment.
But it seems to me that under 21st century conditions, live theatre needs to deliver more than two-and-a-half hours of well-shaped distraction, rounded off with a middlebrow burst of poetic pessimism. It needs energy, urgency, a sense that each production has its own contemporary tale to tell about the text in hand. And although I've seen productions of The Glass Menagerie that make that leap, this one contents itself with smoothness, skill and beauty; and, in the process, sells Williams's great play slightly short.
There's no lack of radical thinking in the story behind Frederic Mohr's Barry, an intriguing solo play first seen back in the early 1980s, and now revived in a touring production by the Borders-based Rowan Tree Company. Set in the first half of the 19th century, the play tells the astonishing story of Dr James Miranda Barry, a senior member of the British army medical corps who served with great distinction in many of the imperial wars and crises of the age, but who – on his death – was discovered to have been a woman all along; and, what's more, a woman who had at some point borne a child.
Mohr divides his story into two acts, separated by almost 40 years of history. In the first, set in 1819, a heavily pregnant Barry – in hiding in Mauritius for the imminent birth of her child – describes her life as a bright girl chosen by her mother's radical friends as the subject of a rare social experiment. She also tells of her passionate love affair with the widowed Charles Somerset, governor of South Africa, to whom she has been personal physician. In the second, a much older Barry, now close to retirement, prepares for a duel with a young pup of a colleague who has called him – or her – "old womanish".
The main problem with the play, though, is that this over-clever structure simply doesn't work as a way of organising the many themes latent in Barry's fascinating story; instead, it obscures them, and burdens the solo performer – in this case the beautiful and talented Isabella Jarrett – with huge amounts of unwieldy exposition and backtracking. John Carnegie's in-the-round production, designed for village halls across the Borders, might overcome these obstacles more effectively if it allowed for more stillness, and less noisy pacing about.
As it is – and despite a simple, effective design by Gregory Smith – the piece comes across as a frustrating jumble of powerful images and ideas, on subjects as topical as military procurement and the poor treatment of frontline troops, as eternal as the role of suppressed sexuality in driving human effort and ambition. It is a vivid jumble, though, rather than a dull one; and Jarrett conveys it with great charm and skill, as well a memorable physical transformation between acts.
&149 The Glass Menagerie continues until 9 February; Barry is at the Citizens' Theatre, Glasgow, 22-26 January, then tours the Borders until 9 February.
The full article contains 1001 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
