CHRIS SEARLE recommends a work of love and deep admiration for a great musician
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The mother, the daughter, her lover and their poet
SIMON PARSONS marvels at a production of Williams’s early masterpiece that transforms the play into a symbolic slow dance of tensions, fears and desires
ALL IN THE MIND: Zacchaeus Kayode, Natalie Kimmerling, Geraldine Somerville and Kasper Hilton-Hille in the Glass Menagerie
[Marc Brenner]
KENNY MacASKILL relishes a fictionalised account of the life and death of the principled Irish anti-colonialist, executed for betraying his English imperial masters
FIONA O’CONNOR admires an ambitious first novel that loosens South Africa’s rainbow collective to examine the racial tensions within
Aussie mining corporation murder, Liverpudlian ex-cop amnesia, a naive vigilante tries to reset capitalism, and the riddle of the dead psychoanalyst
SYLVIA HIKINS is persuaded by an entertaining play that the true miracle of Lourdes would be for attitudes toward disability to change
JAMIE BRITTON recommends this fine analysis of the architectural, ecological and infrastructural destruction of the Gaza Strip
The Glass Menagerie
Bristol Old Vic
STRIPPED of all the 1930s scenic clutter, most naturalistic productions of Tennessee Williams’s first successful play usually embrace, Atri Banarjee’s dynamically rejuvenated version takes the opening monologue as its lodestone — “a memory play” that is “not realistic” and where “everything happens to music.”
Rosanna Vize’s bare, tilted, dance floor-like stage with central column and illuminated, rotating PARADISE sign above allows movement director, Anthony Missen to turn the play into a symbolic slow dance, emphasising the tensions, fears and desires of the characters locked in their own claustrophobic worlds.
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MARY CONWAY becomes impatient with the intellectual self-indulgence of Tom Stoppard in a production that is, nevertheless, total class
GEORGE FOGARTY is captivated by a brilliant one-man show depicting life in HMP Strangeways
WILL STONE applauds a fine production that endures because its ever-relevant portrait of persecution