At the Gate Theatre, February 2009. Published in the Sunday Tribune.

This play is memory. Being a memory play, it is dimly lighted, it is sentimental, it is not realistic.

Tennessee Williams’s analysis, not mine. He gives those lines, more or less, to his narrator, Tom, at the beginning of ‘The Glass Menagerie’, just opened at the Gate.

They make for a necessary warning. ‘The Glass Menagerie’ appears mawkish and melodramatic, at first.

Telly star Francesca Annis plays Amanda Wingfield, the matriarch of a lower middle class family in St Louis, Missouri, in the late 1930s. Amanda is a highly-strung, faded Southern belle, long deserted by her husband, and anxious to see her two adult children, both misfits, settled. Laura, the daughter, is “crippled” by a limp and, more so, by shyness; Tom, the son, is a dreamer, drinker and would-be writer, stuck in a job in a warehouse.

Tennessee Williams’s theme is that of Philip Larkin: “They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do.” As in a classical tragedy, the children are predestined to repeat the traumatic patterns of their parents’ lives. This fear drives Amanda near crazy with worry; and her interventions to thwart fate are precisely the agent of its unfolding.

The formal structure may be classical, but the concerns are modern and mundane: this is, as Williams observes in the stage directions, a “fundamentally enslaved section of American society”. (And what a stage direction!)

Francesca Annis plays Amanda as if she were Blanche DuBois, and her fate were tragic. But Amanda is pathetic, not tragic, and Annis’s luxuriant drawl and quivering inflections appear histrionic.

Despite the short scenes of the first half, as Williams brings us up to speed on his characters’ histories, the pace is languid. At the interval, the play seems dated and the production tiresome. Overbearing mother, drinking son, reclusive daughter, unbridled (and inconsistent) American accents. Enough already.

And then a Gentleman Caller arrives. “He is the long-delayed but always expected something that we live for”, says Williams (through his narrator): till now, this play has been ‘Hamlet’ without the Prince.

Marty Rea, a competent actor with a tendency to play it big, takes the play by the scruff of its overwrought neck and slaps it about a bit. Francesca Annis disappears off stage, and Katie Kirby, as the socially crippled Laura, is left alone with Rea. They sit at the front of the stage, around a candelabra. The melodrama fades with the light, and they talk, gently, for an age.

Kirby emerges, surprisingly, as the star of the piece. Against Annis, she was simply the straight girl, a foil to Annis’s overwrought comedy, almost invisible. Against Rea, her understatement shines.

By the time Annis comes back in, she is entering a different play – one in which her character can be overbearingly sentimental, because the play is not.

Director Robin Lefèvre subverts the earlier histrionics by having Annis deliver a key outburst with her back to the audience.

Eileen Diss’s design is as effective and elegant as any seen on the Gate stage and Mick Hughes’s lighting conspires with the direction to take the mawkish heat out of the play and focus on its quiet heart.

And so it is a play of two halves. Perhaps the first is truer to Tennessee Williams and his desire to write a “sentimental” play, and Francsca Annis is certainly true to the tradition of big performances of Williams’s aging belles.

But, to these eyes at least, “truth” emerges when the volume is turned down. In the understated staging of the quiet scenes of the second half, Williams’s play emerges as not only the familiar tale of familial dysfunction and destruction, but one of simpler, more gentle emotions.