The Glass Menagerie review – cool gloom makes Tennessee Williams’s sadness hit harder

Dundee Rep
Andrew Panton’s production of the memory play gains in quiet domestic realism what it loses in unhinged vitriol

Christopher Jordan-Marshall breathes the evening into life. Gliding into the auditorium with the house lights up, he appears as Tom Wingfield, the narrator of Tennessee Williams’s sad, autobiographical play. He meets us on our own ground and points out the artifice: behind the curtain a memory play of uncertain authority. In a striking opening, the actor is cool and reflective.

In Andrew Panton’s production, he is also defeated. Acted out on Emily James’s barest suggestion of a set – a spiral staircase, a breezy window frame, a hint of gloomy wallpaper lit in moody blues by Simon Wilkinson – it is a depressive reading of the play that the director conjures up. It is also restrained and stately.

At Dundee Rep until 18 October. Then touring until 8 November