The Odeon. State Theatre Company South Australia. 19 Nov 2025

 

The old is new again and yet it is still old. So it feels with State Theatre’s production of Tennessee Williams’ masterpiece, The Glass Menagerie.

 

It is wildly unconventional while holding the play's emotional integrity fiercely in place.

Pleasingly, it showcases yet again the remarkable versatility of the Odeon Theatre in Norwood which most recently was stripped bare to a multimedia hall for Oz Asia and now is reborn with a mega set of dense multi-level complexity reaching from the lighting rigs right to the toes of the front row.

 

The play itself is famously a “memory play”, being melancholy evocations of the playwright's family experiences. The principal character is Tom, Thomas having been Williams’ born first name. The characters of the overbearing and thwarted mother, Amanda, and the disabled lonely Laura bearing no little resemblance to his own family. It is even set in St Louis, wherein the playwright had lived. 

 

If ever there was a sublimely written and piquantly indelible play, this is it, considered by many to be a foundational work of American theatre.

Coincidentally, it was pipped for the 1945 Pulitzer by Mary Chase’s play Harvey, which is about to close in Adelaide after running to full houses at Holden Street Theatres.

Spookily, both plays are about a fading socialite mother desperate to find a match for her unmarried daughter.

 

The Glass Menagerie mother, Amanda Wingfield, is the more tragic by far. Hers is a character part coveted and relished by senior actresses and it is a little surprising to find that State director Shannon Rush has cast and bewigged a decidedly youthful-looking beauty, Ksenja Logos, in the role.  She is a brave choice, especially in the brittleness of her delivery.  Not for her the languid vowels of the American South. Then again, director Rush breaks all sorts of traditions in this production and allows that poor ambitious mother to return to her southern-belle persona almost caricatured as a painted doll with the arrival of the gentleman caller.

 

Mark Thompson’s mega set enables risks. It is a world of myriad moods, a depth of field of fire stairs creating a claustrophobic sense of crowded tenement living. There is a shadowy downstairs street wherein strangers lurk.  There is the fire-escape landing for smoking and moon-gazing, a huge door frame which speaks to the disappointment of the characters who go through it - down into their reliquary of southern grace which is Amanda’s world. The set also respects the early design concept of screens with an astounding painted drop bearing the image of the absent father, alongside an empty Trumpian gilded frame. Darkly transparent, the face drop becomes the characters’ path into their domestic world while the dining room dominates and is to deliver, with Gavin Norris’s artful lighting, one of several scenes of utter theatrical magic. There is yet another level dressed for the living room and yet another for Laura’s gramophone and, oh, yes, the glass menagerie itself which, many-stranded, hangs dreamily from aloft, occasionally illuminated. Hence, the action is layered upon a literal world and flawed reminiscence.  

 

There is a lot to take in. A lot to ponder. And yet therein remains the purity of Tennessee Williams’s first great hit play.

 

Poor Tom, who is both narrator and character in the story, is portrayed most perceptively as hen-pecked son and sweet brother by Laurence Boxhall; good accent, too.  Kathryn (Kitty) Adams makes the heart ache as poor Laura. She captures succinctly Laura’s vulnerability albeit, again, as a director’s choice one assumes, far from the club foot with which Laura is afflicted in many productions, she suffers but an occasional limp, not necessarily the same one. 

 

The Gentleman Caller is played by one Jono Darby. He is positively thrilling. The stage is alive with his presence. Marvellous voice. Light on his feet. Astute in emotional inflection. He is a “find” in the Adelaide theatre.

 

Jamie Hornsby has composed for this piece some theme music which with Andrew Howard’s sound, at first overstates itself but, as the play evolves, finds a level which then blends. Costumes are splendid, right down to Amanda’s seamed stockings.

 

As a whole this State Theatre production is imperfect and at the same time, really quite wondrous.

And Mark Thompson may take a bow.

 

Samela Harris 

 

When: 19 Nov to 7 Dec

Where: The Odeon

Bookings: statetheatrecompany.com.au