But between them they produce enough raw acting talent for
at least ten times that number.
The title aptly sums up the glass-like fragility of three
of the characters, who inhabit a claustrophobic apartment in an American town
during the Depression of the 1930s.
First, there’s the mother Amanda Wingfield, an ageing, out-of-tune
southern belle who has been striving desperately to keep together her family following
the sudden departure of her telephone engineer husband – who we never see apart
from his a faded portrait on the wall – 16 years earlier.
But given her controlling, meddling approach to life, who
could blame the guy for doing a runner to the other side of the continent?
Amanda is played with nothing short of brilliance by
Rachel Morris using, like the rest of the cast, a faultless southern American
accent.
When she talks about all those “gen’lman cawlers” she
used to receive in her gentile youth you really believe that she once lived in
a “f-i-i-i-i-n-e” mansion set in the rolling acres of a plantation.
Every nuance of the character is deftly conveyed, every
movement of her body perfectly executed.
In the apartment Amanda holds sway over her two children.
One of them is son Tom, a man in his early twenties who
is clearly too intelligent for his humble position on the bottom rung of the
ladder at the local warehouse and squanders the days until he can escape to a
new life of adventure in the merchant marine going to the movies, drinking
bourbon and smoking endless cigarettes.
He fights against the smothering of his mother but never
wins.
Bringing Tom, who also steps aside to be the play’s
sardonic narrator, vividly to life is one of the Twenty Club’s youngest
members, Morgan Thomas.
Watching the consummate way he handles this mega-part –
his character is on stage for most of the piece – it’s hard to believe he is
still just 17 years old. This is definitely
an actor who is going places, and not necessarily only with an amateur group.
Third member of the terrific trio is Anna Turner who
plays Tom’s slightly older sister Laura, a painfully shy girl who lives in a world
of her own which revolves round playing old gramophone records left behind by
her absent father and gazing on her display case menagerie of small glass
animals.
Although she has far less dialogue than the other two other
family members, Anna shines in the role, shuffling convincingly around the
stage, wringing her hands and hardly daring to look anyone in the eye.
Her mother’s main aim is life is to get poor Laura
married off – ideally to a man of substance so that she can continue to be financially
supported by him when Tom makes his inevitable break for freedom just like his
father did.
She pleads with Tom to bring home any nice young man he
might know from the warehouse for Laura to meet.
He does just that – and this is when those fragile pieces
of glass in the apartment start to get broken, in more ways than one.
As this marvellously absorbing play has another two
nights to run – tonight (Friday) and tomorrow (Saturday) – it would be unfair to
say just what impact the fourth character, Jim O’Connor, has on the complicated
Wingfield clan.
But it is fair to say the man playing this outgoing young
man of Irish descent who has the gift of the blarney, Aaron Davies, does so
every bit as brilliantly as his three fellow cast members.
With the Glass
Menagerie, which is a credit to its director Natalie Evans, the Twenty Club
has a smash hit on its hands.
See it if you can.
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