Tennessee Williams in The Glass Menagerie remembers a time during the 1930’s Depression when he brought home, at the insistence of his mother, a Gentleman Caller for his disabled sister, only to discover too late that the young man was already engaged.
It remains one of his most popular plays and is regularly revived. Wistful, poetic, and achingly sad, the gentlest of tragedies is excellently acted by an all-American cast at Duke of York’s Theatre.
The relationship between doting, overbearing mother (Cherry Jones) and her son (Michael Esper), who desperately wants to escape her clutches and his dead-end job, is perfectly realised in John Tiffany’s production. In the beautiful second act the painfully self‑conscious sister (Kate O’Flynn), as delicate and fragile as her glass menagerie, entertains the man she had idolised at high school. Their long scene is one of the most heart‑rending in modern drama. Brian J Smith, so nice, so simpatico, so tender and so charming, is perfect. I have not seen the Gentleman Caller better played.
In 1938 Stefan Zweig, an Austrian Jewish refugee living in exile in Britain having fled the Nazis, wrote a novel, Beware of Pity, which has been adapted for the stage by Complicite’s Simon McBurney and Berlin’s Schaubuhne. The performances quickly sold out at the Barbican.
Anton Hofmiller, in middle age, remembers when he was a young and impoverished cavalry officer (pre-World War I) and attended a rich landowner’s ball. He was a success with the ladies and having a pleasant time when he suddenly realised he had not asked his host’s daughter to dance; he quickly made amends only to find, to his great embarrassment, that she was paralysed. Motivated by pity, Hofmiller befriended her and led her to believe that he might marry her; meanwhile her family begins to believe that his love for her might heal her of her disease.
The disabled woman is a shrill, ugly, raging, disturbing presence. Hofmiller should run a mile. Instead, he becomes as emotionally paralysed as she is physically paralysed.
McBurney and the actors take the audience on an exhausting emotional and psychological ride. The production (performed in German with surtitles) is staged with his characteristic inventive artifice and the story, vocally and visually, is extremely powerful.
The Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, the Globe’s intimate indoor 17th-century theatre, is lit by candlelight, chandelier and handheld; and this is perfect for The White Devil, John Webster’s dark chamber of horrors. Jacobean audiences liked nothing better than sadistic, gory melodrama – the more murders the better. A stage filled with corpses made for ideal entertainment. The characters are cruel and violent, obsessed with corruption and death. The play was very popular in the 17th century but ignored in the 18th and 19th. Bernard Shaw dismissed Webster as “the Tussaud Laureate”.
Sex with Strangers, the title Laura Eason has chosen for her two-hander at Hampstead Theatre, could well put off the very people who would like it while encouraging others to come for the wrong reasons.
Two writers (Emilia Fox and Theo James) meet at a writers’ retreat in snow-bound Michigan. There is no television, no mobile signal and no internet. I thought the play might get really nasty and have the sting of Neil LaBute. But no such luck.
