If you see this show you’ll want to see it again – directed properly: The Glass Menagerie, at the Duke of York's Theatre, reviewed

The Glass Menagerie directed by Jeremy Herrin is a bit of an eyeball-scrambler. The action takes place on a huge black platform flanked by 1930s antiques: a typewriter, a broken piano, a reel-to-reel tape recorder and a smattering of Anglepoise lamps. This cryptic setting suggests that the play is being developed in a Museum of the Great Depression, and the show we are seeing is the latest rehearsal. It’s not clear what purpose is served by this fiddly imposture. And although the act of sabotage doesn’t quite destroy the show, it’s touch and go during the opening 20 minutes.

Herrin has shared the role of Tom between two actors. Tom Glynn-Carney is a character who participates in the action and Paul Hilton is a narrator who explains the drama to us. Hilton, a talented thesp, has been asked to disrupt his colleagues by miming and mugging from the fringes throughout each scene. He runs through an endless repertoire of gestures, grimaces and other expressions which damage the play whenever he overdoes things. Alas, he gives into temptation all too often. Having a spare actor larking about on the touch-line like a football mascot is nuts.

Having a spare actor larking about on the touch-line like a football mascot is nuts

So is the soundtrack, which seems to have a mind of its own and keeps barging in and obscuring the spoken performances. Never mind. The play is a sublime organism, exquisitely poised between comedy and tragedy, and it features some of Tennessee Williams’s most beautiful rhetoric. Amy Adams shines as Amanda Wingfield, the interfering matriarch whose frantic and deranged snobbery is offset by her loving goodness and her honourable desire to get the best for her difficult children. Herrin’s show makes a powerful and eloquent argument against his artistic approach. If you see this show you’ll want to see it again – directed properly.