A huge illuminated sign, Paradise, the ironic name of the adjacent dance-hall, rotates very slowly over a circular stage, within which the family seem trapped, mother Amanda clinging onto lost days of youthful conquests, poetic son Tom seeking escape and the preternaturally shy daughter Laura, mentally bruised by childhood disability.
Amanda, long abandoned by a drunkard husband, maintains stiff Southern courtesy at all costs, hoping for the day a ‘gentleman caller’ will visit Laura in their St Louis, Missouri home. When Tom invites a warehouse colleague, it turns out to be Joe, the former schoolmate whom Laura secretly idolised, but after their emotionally-charged meeting—which brought a large lump to my throat—Laura breaks as easily as one of the glass animals that surround them.
The play, filled with love, anger and regret, is directly autobiographical, Tennessee Williams’s schizophrenic sister having spent most of her life in mental institutions following a prefrontal lobotomy in 1943 that their mother had authorised. Williams was appalled and wrote the play the following year. The events dominated his feelings and writing for the rest of his life, and when he died, he left most of his fortune for her care.
Atri Banerjee’s production does not attempt naturalism. Rosanna Vize’s set and Lee Curran’s stunning lighting design mean there is little sense of the hot, suffocating environment of the Deep South, but there is no let-up in the emotional charge.
Geraldine Somerville is the perfect picture of enforced Southern gentility, reluctant to abandon a reverie of her one-time 17 gentlemen callers, but pulling every sinew as taut as a bowstring as she confronts a sad world of lost dreams.
Natalie Kimmerling is magnificent as Laura, devoting her time to the care of her rainbow-coloured miniature menagerie, moving with short, hesitant steps, but longing to be swept up by the very forces she fears. Kasper Hilton-Hille plays Tom (Williams’s real name before he changed it to Tennessee) with a wistful tenderness.
But the longest speech addressed to Laura is given not to Tom but to the ‘gentleman caller’ Joe, played by Zacchaeus Kayode, who delivers the writer's elegantly crafted lines with feeling and precision. He urges her to be proud to be different, to rise above her lack of self-confidence, to be special. It is particularly poignant as Williams wrote his address knowing it contained an injunction she could never fulfil.
The play's UK tour continues to Kingston, Bristol, Bath and Alexandra Palace until 1 June.