Greta Scacchi and Tom Mothersdale will be joined by Erin Doherty and Eric Kofi Abrefa in Ellen McDougall’s production of Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie, a co-production between West Yorkshire Playhouse, Headlong and Liverpool Everyman & Playhouse.
Written in 1944, The Glass Menagerie is Williams’s first successful play and his first to be performed on Broadway, after which it went on the win the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award in 1945 and later a Pulitzer Prize.
Containing strong autobiographical elements, this “memory play” is the story of a dysfunctional family caught up in a claustrophobic world of nostalgia and regret, where fragile dreams are pitted against the brutality of the modern world. By night, Tom lives the life of an assassin, an outlaw, a czar of the underworld, via his trips to the movies. By day, he works in a factory. In the apartment he shares with mother Amanda and sister Laura, the air hangs thick with the scent of sickly sweet flowers and his mother’s oppressive nostalgia. When Amanda insists he brings home a gentleman caller for Laura, the fragile dreams of all three are shattered with consequences they may never escape.
The Glass Menagerie is at West Yorkshire Playhouse from Saturday 12th September to Saturday 3rd October 2015. Tickets cost £29 – £13. Book online at wyp.org.uk or call Box Office on 0113 213 7700.
