![]() ![]() Ivo shrewdly suggests real vitality and manufactured assurance. As the ravening mother, Geraldine Somerville tightens her voice to slide between flutter and bitterness her mincing memories of southern servants have an added edge as Eloka Ivo, who plays the “gentleman caller”, is black. Rhiannon Clements’s disabled sister is unusually forthright but caged in herself. The characters begin facing away from one another, their energy sapped. It also includes a wild, fantastic dance to Whitney Houston’s One Moment in Time: what could be more apt when the real exploration here is of how memory ensnares and deceives? Atri Banerjee’s production does not hammer home these circumstances or their contemporary parallels, but tellingly threads the evening through with Giles Thomas’s epoch-hopping music. There are traces of both periods in talk of distant bombardment, of straitened circumstances. Tennessee Williams’s play, though set in the 30s, was first produced in 1944. The effect, hauntingly lit by Lee Curran, is tremendous, ironic, melancholic. Its huge neon letters hang over the action, slowly revolving, as if to taunt the unhappy household beneath. A sign for the Paradise dance hall, originally tiny, now dominates an almost bare (scattered mics and chairs, and later jonquils) stage. ![]() In an unusually illuminating programme note to The Glass Menagerie, Rosanna Vize describes how pandemic postponement led her completely to change her design. Not for the first time in the evening, the audience’s own eyes are prised open. Though the script is baggy, it does nip: Joan turns on the clerics in gowns who will send them to the stake, as they click around like clockwork toys – and remarks that while fussing about Joan’s clothes, they are blind to their own. Jolyon Coy is a very funny dauphin, stamping toddler-like in underpants and crown Adam Gillen finely inflected as a misfit in macho land. Naomi Kuyck-Cohen (hoorah! I remember her talent as a student a decade ago) has created a marvellous wooden wave – a skateboarder’s ramp – down which characters slide into major action and climb to take the higher view. Dance sweeps the stage as Joan develops a new vocabulary of spiky, pulsing gesture and movement to galvanise an army. A band – tuba, trombone and percussion – perform Laura Moody’s music, under the direction of Joley Cragg: growling, resonant, nothing flutey or tinkling everything requiring puff and swagger and frankness – and oh the dying roar that is emitted in martial defeat. “I must alter what they see so they can hear me.” Later, they kick aside a puddle of pink garments that the queen and queen mother – formidable in slinky gowns – press upon them. Here, the transformation scene is as complete as Cinderella’s, but instead of rags to ballgown it has Joan shucking their cumbersome peasant skirt and strapping on warrior wear. All elements are vibrantly rethought in Ilinca Radulian’s production. You can be with a character step by step, and the self-discovery is wraparound, extending beyond an individual actor. There is no better place to see someone making themselves up than in the theatre.
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