The play is a sublime organism, exquisitely poised between comedy and tragedy, and it features some of Tennessee Williams’s most beautiful rhetoric. So is the soundtrack, which seems to have a mind of its own and keeps barging in and obscuring the spoken performances. Having a spare actor larking about on the touch-line like a football mascot is nuts Having a spare actor larking about on the touch-line like a football mascot is nuts. Alas, he gives into temptation all too often. He runs through an endless repertoire of gestures, grimaces and other expressions which damage the play whenever he overdoes things. Hilton, a talented thesp, has been asked to disrupt his colleagues by miming and mugging from the fringes throughout each scene. Tom Glynn-Carney is a character who participates in the action and Paul Hilton is a narrator who explains the drama to us. Herrin has shared the role of Tom between two actors. And although the act of sabotage doesn’t quite destroy the show, it’s touch and go during the opening 20 minutes. It’s not clear what purpose is served by this fiddly imposture. This cryptic setting suggests that the play is being developed in a Museum of the Great Depression, and the show we are seeing is the latest rehearsal. The action takes place on a huge black platform flanked by 1930s antiques: a typewriter, a broken piano, a reel-to-reel tape recorder and a smattering of Anglepoise lamps. The Glass Menagerie directed by Jeremy Herrin is a bit of an eyeball-scrambler.
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