“The Glass Menagerie”, Dundee Rep

Mark Brown on Tayside
10 October 2025
★★★★☆

Tennessee Williams’s great, poetic play The Glass Menagerie (which premiered in Chicago in 1944) is such a beloved stage drama that it has been adapted for the cinema and television on a number of occasions (most famously by Irving Rapper in 1950, Anthony Harvey in 1973 and Paul Newman in 1987). Williams’s evergreen opus is enduringly popular in the UK, as attested to by the frequency with which it is produced, from Jay Miller’s staging at the Yard Theatre, London earlier in the year to this new production at Dundee Rep. As Rep director Andrew Panton’s new staging on Tayside proves, the piece has lost none of its ability to captivate.

Clockwise top: Chris Jordan-Marshall, Sara Stewart, Amy Conachan.
Photo credit: Tommy Ga-Ken Wan.

A self-proclaimed “memory play” set in St Louis, Missouri in the late 1930s, Williams’s story unfolds in the mind of its sometime narrator Tom Wingfield (played by Christopher Jordan-Marshall). Nicknamed “Shakespeare”, Tom is a warehouse worker and frustrated poet.

His mother Amanda (Sara Stewart) is a quintessential Williams creation. A declining southern belle who bewails the loss of the old slave-owning economy, she utters vile racial epithets (including the n-word) with casual alacrity.

The formidable matriarch is a combination, in equal parts, of iron-clad determination, bitter regret and desperate vulnerability. Indeed, she is a character so brilliantly observed that she is worthy of Chekhov, that other great observer of a landowning class in terminal decline.

The primary subject of Amanda’s abundant anxiety is her daughter Laura (Amy Conachan), who has a physical disability that was caused by pleurosis during adolescence. Set on marrying her timid, insecure daughter to an eligible bachelor, the materfamilias has enjoined Tom to bring a “gentleman caller” – namely Jim O’Connor (played by Declan Spaine) – from his workplace.

Panton’s staging (which is created in association with – and tours to – the Citizens Theatre, Glasgow and the Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh) carries both the shimmering uncertainty and the focused clarity of memory. It is assisted in this creative paradox by top-notch set and lighting design (by Emily James and Simon Wilkinson, respectively).

However, superb though James’s semi-abstract set is in visual terms, one might wish that the spiral staircase adjoined to her tenement building was a tad sturdier. The structure sways distractingly, like a sailboat in high winds, every time a character takes to the stairs.

The quartet of actors (including actor-guitarist and singer Spaine, who provides the production with emotionally affecting live music) is universally excellent. Jordan-Marshall embodies Tom’s clarity of vision – and his empathy, resentment and anguish – with admirable sure-footedness.

Sara Stewart gives a well balanced performance as the deplorable-yet-pitiable Amanda. She is often very funny, too. The scene in which she emerges in a hideous, moth-eaten, dusty vintage dress that she considers the height of Southern sophistication is a comic case in point.

Amy Conachan’s Laura goes past pity, giving Laura a depth of feeling that transcends the pathos of the isolated young woman with her symbolically fragile collection of glass animals.

Spaine is cast interestingly as Jim. As a Black man playing a character who could, in actuality, only be white (an African-American “gentleman caller” being anathema to the fundamentally racist Amanda), his casting emphasises the constructive artificiality of both memory and theatre.

At Dundee Rep until 18 October, then touring until 8 November: https://dundeerep.co.uk