The Glass Menagerie, The Yard Theatre, stage review: ‘Sombre symbolism’
Eva Morgan and Jad Sayegh in The Glass Menagerie. Photograph: Manuel Harlan
“The play is memory,” states narrator Tom Wingfield, challenging the audience in the first five minutes.
In this case, he is referring to the fractured recollections of a life-changing night in the 1930s. In a wider sense, it feels like a nod to the past 14 years of The Yard Theatre ahead of its imminent transformation.
Crumbling mental and social deconstruction set within a slowly dismantling theatre? Now this is the sort of meta rabbit hole that critics like me go crazy for!
Founded by Jay Miller in 2011 as a temporary pop-up, The Yard is still here over a decade later. It has given a platform to Michaela Coel, Alexander Zeldin, and Vinay Patel, to name a few.
If you want to see a snippet of the reach of this little industrial shell, look back at past issues of this very paper. Though I haven’t always loved the risks the Yard team has taken, I have always commended them for doing so.
The venue is now set to wrap itself in a cocoon to form something brighter and more expansive: doubling in size, emerging in 2026 with a bigger bar/cafe, more community projects and finally getting rid of those cursed plastic chairs (my lower lumbar rejoices).
In the meantime, March has sprung, the jonquils (smaller, more fragrant daffodils) are sprouting, and Miller is cleverly staging an utterly mind-splintering interpretation of Tennessee Williams’ break-out play.
After premiering in 1944, The Glass Menagerie, despite a rocky start, catapulted Williams into the public eye, enduring as one of his most complex and autobiographical works.
Tom Varey and Sharon Small on stage. Photograph: Manuel Harlan
Tom (played by Tom Varey), unhappy in his factory job, is pressured by his histrionic mother Amanda (Sharon Small) to bring home a gentleman caller for his disabled sister, Laura (Eva Morgan). These are the bones to which Williams’ poetic prose clings.
What follows is an effort to create on stage the concepts of memory and dream – notoriously slippery beasts. Some experiments work, some don’t, but the attempt is pulse-quickening.
We have looping music, underwater sounds, songs from Laura’s little record player that flow like a river through the mind. Sarah Readman’s lighting gives a surreal, half-remembered quality, like paint in water.
The costumes, too, reference the play’s sombre symbolism: out-of-proportion shoulders, half-deconstructed jackets, and blue roses snaking up Laura’s dress. Characters run around the post-apocalyptic set and explode out of a wardrobe, conversations are spoken out to the audience – this does, at times, proves to be challenging, it is indicative of the act of reminiscence.
Varey as our disillusioned narrator copes well with his character’s constant rambling, and Sharon Small gives us a flexible and spirited Amanda. Eva Morgan works in hints of Stimming to deepen Laura’s reluctance to interact with the outside world, preferring the little glass figures of the play’s title.
In the dancing candlelight, Laura and Jim (Jad Sayegh), the gentleman caller, sift through moments of soft intimacy.
How much can you play with a classic? Or a memory for that matter? Push it too far and it falls through your fingers and disappears into the carpet.
This piece is silvery and inky, arresting, conflicting at points, outstanding and otherworldly. It is yet more proof of The Yard’s importance, and playfully hints at the wonders it could achieve with more room to explore. 2026 can’t come soon enough!
The Glass Menagerie runs until 10 May at The Yard Theatre.