The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams

Headlong, West Yorkshire Playhouse, Liverpool Playhouse Co production

Directed by Ellen McDougall

Design Fly Davis

Lighting Richard Howell

Sound Gareth Fry

Movement Tom Jackson Grieves

**** "McDougall’s production is fascinatingly clear eyed. Fly Davis’s excellent design turns the Wingfield family’s apartment into a grey on black coffin, isolated by a moat of dark water. " Sunday Times

**** "A revival to remember. Boldy Staged. Fly Davis’s design, a grey frame suspended over a trough of water, is barren in the extreme; it suits McDougall’s visual concept of characters turning slowly through space, like broken figurines in an abandoned musical box."  The Guardian

**** " The set, unfurnished but for a staircase to nowhere. There’s no way out and nowhere to hide. The Glass Menagerie becomes Huis Clois: three people trapped together forever. Gone too are the dinky figurines, replaced by a single snow globe. Laura lollops about unevenly in one white wedge shoe – a real constraint standing in for her disability. The shoe eventually flies off, when her dance with Jim (Eric Kofi Abrefa) bursts into a full-blown jive – symbolic of newfound freedom and confidence. Their encounter, so tender and tiptoeing, suddenly explodes with feeling, enough to make your heart-swell. With our virtual versions and our self-Googling, we’re probably worse. Wires curl through the Wingfield’s flat, hanging down into the water – a marker that this is the first networked society. Everyone is more connected, and yet more isolated, than ever before."  Whats On Stage

"This production is McDougall’s triumph. Laura is hobbled by a brutal platform heel, she limps around the grey box set with one foot bare, the other clamped like a vice. It is Laura not Tom caught in femininity’s bear trap" The Times