Review Roundup: THE GLASS MENAGERIE, Starring Amy Adams

Second Half Productions just celebrated opening night of The Glass Menagerie, a new revival of Tennessee Williams's celebrated memory play, directed by award-winning director Jeremy Herrin. Performances will run at The Duke of York's Theatre until 27 August.

Jeremy Herrin's bold new staging explores the fragility and fallibility of memory in Tennessee Williams's semi-autobiographical masterpiece. Six-time Academy Award nominated and two-time Golden Globe winning actress Amy Adams takes on the role of one of Williams's most iconic matriarchs Amanda Wingfield, a former Southern Belle living precariously with her two children, Tom and Laura, in a space between past and present. Tony award-nominee Paul Hilton and Tom Glynn-Carney will both play Tom - at different stages of the character's life - with Lizzie Annis as Laura and Victor Alli as Jim O'Connor.

Let's see what the critics had to say...

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Cindy Marcolina, BroadwayWorld: With her name appearing bigger than both title and playwright on the poster, Adams is obviously the top-billed star. However, she is surrounded by finer performances than her own. She is a minimalist in her imperiousness and cinematic in her poise, too much so, and ends up stifled by the other's theatrical confidence. Her Amanda is composed and haughty as she hides a short fuse behind perfect propriety. If looks could kill, Tom would be dead a thousand times over, but looks are all they are. Glynn-Carney is exuberant and theatrical in his frustration and impudence. This restlessness is mirrored by the regret in Hilton's longing and wistful stares at his younger self.

Arifa Akbar, Guardian: Adams's West End debut is solid but unremarkable. She plays Amanda Wingfield, the temperamental matriarch desperate to find a husband for her disabled daughter, Laura (Lizzie Annis) and keep a grip on her son, Tom (Tom Glynn-Carney), whose work at a shoe warehouse leaves him with itchy feet - and a desire to be away from this suffocating household in St Louis. Amanda is puzzlingly cheery and wholesome, initially unrecognisable as the faded southern belle from Mississippi who boasts of once having drawn 17 suitors in a single day.

Frey Kwa Hawking, WhatsonStage: It's altogether a cosier two and a half hours than you might expect: it's a production which handles its audience and characters carefully, unafraid of its own quietness. The lasting impression is more of a mood than any revelation. It passes over you like a dream, dissolving gently.

Alice Saville, Independent: The Glass Menagerie is typically funny as well as tragic, but this production is light on laughter. That's mostly down to Adams, who delivers a likeable but underpowered performance. Her anguish at her children's struggles feels real. But she lacks the flamboyant charisma of a woman who regales her children with monologues on the virtues of thorough mastication at the dinner table. Or who pours her underused verbal talents into selling magazine subscriptions over the phone. Still, though this staging lacks the vigour to fully hit home, it's a welcome chance to revisit this play. There's something very current about its vision of a cash-strapped family lost in the futile dreams of a better life, as the threat of war rumbles just beyond the confines of their stifling apartment.

Clive Davis, Times: Is there enough star power to keep the revival aloft? The casting of the Hollywood luminary Amy Adams as Amanda Wingfield, the troubled matriarch in this early work by Tennessee Williams, may be the main selling point. Whether the gambit works is another matter. All praise to Adams, nevertheless, for taking on a role that has tested many an actress.

Dominic Cavendish, Telegraph: Steeped in pained autobiography, Tennessee Williams's 1944 breakthrough play The Glass Menagerie comes round often. It's only five years since we last saw it in the West End. So it's a bold move for the American star Amy Adams to make her London theatrical debut in a classic mounted to acclaim here recently and at the self-same theatre - the Duke of York's - as that previous production.

Photo Credit: Johan Persson

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