The Glass Menagerie, The Yard: A small piece of magic from an unsung London theatre

Telegraph

12-03-2025

'We reimagine theatre to reimagine the world' runs the mission-statement of The Yard in Hackney Wick. A grand claim. But weighing the evidence of the past 14 years, the vaunt seems amply justified.
As the east London space – an inspiring labour of love by founding director Jay Miller – reaches the final production in its current guise (it will be demolished to make way for a bigger, better equipped building, opening next year), it can take pride in its survival and achievements. For me, the stand-out remains Alexander Zeldin's Beyond Caring, a devastating piece about zero-hours contracts, which went to the National. But it's the overall ambience that counts – the sense of adventure that permeates its post-industrial environs, its night-clubby foyer, its frisky programme. It exudes rough magic.
Which makes it a neat, if counter-intuitive, trick to mount The Glass Menagerie as the swansong. It might seem like a safe bet, but was once anything but. 'Darlin', we gonna change the whole theatre I'm telling you,' Margo Jones, who co-directed Tennessee Williams's succès fou on Broadway, declared on opening night in 1945. And, in holding its audience spellbound, Williams's autobiographically inspired 'memory play', conjuring a dream-like domestic scene of pent-up yearning in St Louis, did revitalise the art-form, its author striving to replace 'the exhausted theatre of realistic conventions'.
Miller has lavished fitting amounts of devotion and attention to the evening, staying true to the script but also its invitation to innovate. With exquisite acting across the board and inspired set design from Cécile Tremolières, he forges a sense of something at once thrown together yet carefully crafted.
Jolting sounds, eerie echoes, strains of music and abrupt lighting cues – creating fleeting apparitions – stir a sense that this is taking place inside the head of Tom Wingfield (Tom Varey), as he recalls the struggling mother (Amanda) and mentally fragile sister (Laura) he forsook. Miller has a painterly eye – denoting the core conflict in an initial tableau: Sharon Small's Amanda, indomitable yet isolated, to one side, on the other, by a fire exit, Jad Sayegh's Gentleman Caller, all male mystique in a mustard yellow suit and tipped fedora.
Every scene feels freshly invigorated, every detail the gift of a subconscious prompting: the 'menagerie' of glass animals tended to by Eva Morgan's sweetly introverted Laura dangle on a triple-tier stand, as if suggestive of the wedding she'll never enjoy. Varey's malcontent Tom inclines to darting restlessness, spray-painting the back-wall as if colliding drudgery with frustrated creativity and at times illuminating the action by means of a head-lamp.
That striking approach reaches its apotheosis in an unforgettable denouement, in which Varey escapes through that fire-door only to re-emerge – repeatedly – through the audience, a light bobbing in the void, as if doomed never to leave the past behind. The soundtrack to that? The wistful anthem Stay with Me by Shakespears Sister (itself a nod to lines in the text). I've seen this play many times, but this ranks as one of its finest iterations.
Run extended to May 10. Tickets: