Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10

Cast: Eric Kofi Abrefa, Erin Doherty, Tom Mothersdale, Greta Scacchi.

If you can place human experience into the realms of the zoo, the caged animal yearning for freedom, an escape from the rigid and the pawed upon control that comes with the overpowering smell that lingers with the cruelly defeated and gazed upon, then that tightness, that crushed inevitability of life’s cruel illusion is only tempered by the huge cosmic joke played upon us all and perhaps arguably no play best typifies this than Tennessee William’s The Glass Menagerie.

Since its conception as a play, and like the matriarch of the stifled family unit Amanda, The Glass Menagerie has known both good times and bad both in the U.K. and more notably in America. It could be regarded as a play for different seasons, when the fragility of the world’s economy is perhaps at the point of tipping it comes riding in like a stallion, a memory of what once was and urging by some reason of theatrical osmosis to the audience that we are all under scrutiny, to see how we behave in such times and that the representation of glass throughout reflects the illusion of what is precious and what can be easily shattered.

The feeling of illusion, of shifting blame and bottled resentment is overpowering and yet with typical William’s humour placed within, the human zoo on display only ever descends into the cries of caged animals as the play reaches its bitter and perhaps most cruel of endings. The human psyche can be just as weak as glass, as unstable as a figurine and this mental state of mind was captured with some incredible depth by relative newcomer Erin Doherty as the narrator of the play’s sister Laura and in the guiding astonishing beauty that radiated out from Greta Scacchi as the forgotten and wilting flower Amanda.

Erin Doherty framed the point of human infirmity from a position of strength. The representation of glass, of someone so complex and painfully shy having no discernible transparency until viewed from a different angle but to whom was never to be touched lest the illusion shatter beyond repair was both magnificent and built with tension and beauty in Ms. Doherty’s captivating performance.

If any American playwright can capture the sensitivity of the frail and complex state of human experience, who can make the opaque mist of illusion suddenly compressible and clear, then Tennessee Williams has that power and for the rapturous applause given over by the Playhouse Theatre audience, that sudden clarity of having watched a moment of stunning growing intensity, was a moment to treasure.

Ian D. Hall