Sad tale sizzles in the heat

The Glass Menagerie at The Everyman Palace Theatre, Cork.

HOT, sticky weather is a good start for a Tennessee Williams play, whether it be in America’s Deep South or Cork MacCurtain Street.

It’s the mark of a good production to be surprised by the power of a play like The Glass Menagerie which has become a familiar tower in modern drama.

Director Pat Talbot lets the play move slowly, allowing it to become an elegy for lives that flap about but never take off.

Set in the America of the 1930s, it is an almost unbearably sad story.

Myles Horgan is the narrator of the story in which he and his sister live in the shadow of their mother’s suffocating love and ambition. Horgan brings an effortless grace and humour to the part, finding just the right pitch for each moment.

Julie Sharkey is his crippled sister who loses herself in her menagerie of glass figures. It is a part that could drown under its sheer tragic weight. But Sharkey’s performance suggests the character is not lost but is a peculiarly adaptive survivor.

Barbara Babcock is the mother who is one of the most archly ambitious, flirtatious and desperate characters ever put on stage. She goes to the outer reaches of this enormous character, yet she also finds her lonely, deluded centre.

Much talked about in the first half, the gentleman caller eventually arrives in the form of Raymond Scannell who brings to life a character full of all the hope of America but also the hard reality of life being trampled under foot in the race to progress.

Pat Talbot and Company at the Everyman have given themselves a hard act to follow.

Liam Heylin