THEATRE

Swannee Williams

The Glass Menagerie. (Haymarket.)—Hello, Dolly! (Drury Lane.) T WONDER what moved Messrs. Tennent and their collaborators to revive The Glass Menagerie at this point precisely, when its style is bound to seem both particularly dated and uncomfortably close. Sheer devilment, perhaps. `The play is a memory. Being a memory play, it is dimly lighted, it is sentimental, it is not realistic,' says Ian McShane as the playwright, announcing his oeuvre before stepping inside and becoming a character. He is asking altogether too much of himself and his fellow actors; Vivien Matalon's production, though sometimes dimly lit, is realistic and not sentimental.

The play proper is supposedly a flashback to Tom Wingfield's past. Mr. Matalon has whittled down the transformation apparatus as un- obtrusively as possible: the transparent fourth wall has gone, real knives and forks replace pretend ones (the cigarettes were real even in the 'forties, which suggests that the line-dividing two sorts of illusion was always arbitrary), a vestigial gauze curtain remains, hanging across the stage and sometimes whisked aside, discon- certing the audience, studiously ignored by the actors. Music still plays at moments of signifi- cant emotion, but without a wink from the play- wright—the excellent Mr. McShane under- standably disclaiming responsibility for this' humourless highbrow once he is safely within the play, in his character as Tom, the struggling poet who toils by day and lives by night at the movies: 'They call me Killer, Killer Wingfield, I'm leading a double life.'

Tom's older self talks rather differently, in terms of 'sex that hung in•the air like a chan- delier, flooding the world with brief, deceptive

rainbows.' The ironic voice is more seemly nowadays, and this production doesn't attempt

to reconcile the two, in fact drives a wedge be- tween them which in the end can only emphasise the vacuum at the centre of the play.

For the moment we can pick and choose, dis- carding 'poetic truth' in favour of Mrs. Wing-

field's view of sex', still current according to Jules Feiffer's weekly bulletins: Don't quote instinct to me! Instinct is something that people have got away from! It belongs to animals!

Christian adults don't want it!' Gwen Ffrangcon- Davies settles down to Amanda Wingfield, managing mother of two disappointing children, like a musician to a score worthy of his mettle, and performs prodigies on the exclamation marks. George Baker is a delight as Jim the

gentleman caller, an all-American hero fallen on evil days since high school. But there is a

catch, and it is Laura, the crippled daughter,

never been touched and liable to throw up on contact with anyone less tender than her family. The trouble is that Tom has no function be- yond introducing the gentleman caller, Jim is

dismissed after his one scene, it is not Amanda's

play—and the more rigorously sentimentality is excluded from these three performances, the

heavier the burden on Laura. Anna Massey looks pathetically right, trudging across the stage on her malformed foot, or ruefully tweaking out the gay deceivers inserted by Amanda in her bosom, but the text gives her little else to do, and pity wears pretty thin as the staple of the evening.

If the production as a whole has an air of making the best of a bad job, Miss Massey willy-nilly has the worst of it.

As for Hello, Dolly!, there is little to be said for it, and if there were it would be superfluous since the management are reported to be organ- ising their own rave reviews.

HILARY SPURLINO