Black Swan reimagine Tennessee Williams classic ‘The Glass Menagerie’

His Majesty’s Theatre lights up from 2-21 August with Clare Watson’s captivating reimagining of The Glass Menagerie – a mind-bending masterpiece that questions truth and reality.

Winner of the New York Drama Critics’ Circle award for Best American Play back in 1944. The Glass Menagerie is the timeless family drama that thrust Tennessee Williams into the international spotlight. Now in 2022 it’s back, in all its haunting beauty – and it’s never hit so close to home.

Amanda Wingfield only wants the best for her two children, Tom and Laura. With her socialite adolescence behind her, Amanda puts all her energies into pushing her children up the social and financial ladder from which she has fallen. Shadowed by the absence of a father, they struggle to break free from their mother’s imposing ways.

Clare Watson (York, The Torrents) exquisitely directs Tennessee Williams’ most vulnerable and semi-autobiographical play. Fuelled by pity and duty, burdened by love and hate, the Wingfields are one of theatre’s most iconic and heartbreakingly real families.

The incredible cast includes much loved Mandy McElhinney (Wakefield, Love Child, Paper Giants), as matriarch Amanda Wingfield, Joel Jackson as her son Tom Wingfield (Peter Allen: Not The Boy Next Door, Ms. Fisher’s Modern Murder Mysteries), along with Acacia Daken as daughter and sister Laura Wingfield (Itch, Lies Within Us) and Jake Fryer-Hornsby as Jim O’Connor, the gentleman caller (Halim, Dracula).

“An astounding self-portrait by the great Tennessee Williams, this play is full of humour and heartbreak, and it is a great honour to collaborate with Mandy McElhinney as she brings Amanda into full, glorious life,” Watson says of the production.

“This production should pique our nostalgia and arouse our yearning. It’s like we’re watching ourselves on VHS in a time when we were a little more glamorous and much more devil-may-care. Who’s at the door? Could that be the gentleman caller?”

This ambitious new production proudly presented by Black Swan serves as a powerful meditation on the fragility of memory and asks, how do you escape reality when there’s nowhere left to hide?

The Glass Menagerie runs from 2nd – 21st August at the State Theatre Centre of Western Australia. For tickets and more info, head to bsstc.com.au

Image: Frances Andrijich

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