The Glass Menagerie
Tom: Perhaps I am walking along a street at night, in some strange city, before I have found companions. I pass the lighted window of a shop where perfume is sold. The window is filled with pieces of coloured glass, tiny transparent bottles in delicate colours, like bits of a shattered rainbow.
The Glass Menagerie is a memory play. Tom Wingfield recalls the story of a family struggling to make ends meet during America’s Great Depression in the 1930s. The mother, Amanda, strives to improve their hopeless situation by recounting memories of her youth, in an attempt to steer the children into a safe haven. Tom dreams of a career as a poet. His sister, Laura, is vulnerable because of her psychological illness, unable to get along in the real world. His hoped-for fiancé, Joe, a level-headed realist, shows up, only to confront their daydreams with a cruel reality…
“When you look at a piece of delicately spun glass you think of two things: how beautiful it is and how easily it can be broken,” says author Tennessee Williams in the notes for the performance. Every person is such a fragile “thing” in the hustle and bustle of the world.
“I can’t write about anything that does not involve me, anything in which I am not emotionally involved. I confine myself to the kind of material that is personal”, comments Williams, who never denied that his subjects, including The Glass Menagerie, were inspired by the events of his own life.
Born in Columbus, Mississippi, Williams grew up in the American South. A severe illness isolated him as a child, and in this seclusion, he read and wrote a lot. His writing was first published by a local paper when he was only sixteen. He was a sensitive boy, and his personality was marked by a heavy-handed father, an over-protective mother, and his attachment to his sister treated for schizophrenia who would have a tragic life – as though we were looking at the characters of The Glass Menagerie.
Tennessee Williams (1911-1983) is one of the most important American playwrights of the 20th century. The Glass Menagerie was his first theatrical hit in Chicago in 1944. The play soon made it to Broadway, it saw over five hundred performances, and won the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award. It was adapted into film in the 1980s, starring John Malkovich and directed by Paul Newman. Williams’ biggest success was A Streetcar Named Desire, which premiered in 1947 and was filmed already in 1951, starring Vivien Leigh and Marlon Brando. His Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Sweetbird of Youth continue to be popular to this very day. In total, he wrote twenty full-length plays, and countless one-act plays, novels, poems, stories and essays.
The production is directed by Norway’s Eirik Stubø, whose first success at the National Theatre was Electra by Eugene O’Neill, another great American playwright, at MITEM. In 2019, he directed Euripides’ Medeia with the National Theatre Company.
