In memory, everything seems to happen to music,’ narrator Tom Wingfield remarks at the outset of Tennessee Williams’s 1944 autobiographical play. It’s a notion that director Joe Hill-Gibbins takes literally in his sumptuously realised expressionistic revival, Leo Bill’s Tom – the thwarted ‘Shakespeare’ of the local warehouse – serving as conductor not only of his memories but also of a small group of musicians (multi-instrumentalist Simon Allen and pianist Eliza McCarthy), occasionally turning to them to cue their accompaniments.
The action takes place in the Wingfield household, bossed by faded Southern belle Amanda, her monstrous, self-deluding optimism perfectly captured by Deborah Findlay. In Jeremy Herbert’s multilayered design, dominated by a huge portrait of the vanished Wingfield father, curtains are raised and lowered to suggest the shifting tectonic plates of Tom’s recollections, the actors framed in the low, glamorous light of memory – magically conjured here by James Farncombe – like silhouettes in a magic-lantern show.
Williams’s play is one of the great theatrical treatments of illusion and disappointment, and Hill Gibbins’s production is merciless in seeking out and raising the delicate hopes of Tom’s sister Laura – whose sense of self is even more fragile than her titular collection of glass animals – the better and more finally to dash them. The climactic scene between Laura and her ‘gentleman caller’ Jim is beautifully played by Sinéad Matthews and Kyle Soller, whose finger-wagging enthusiasm briefly points towards a happy ending. There’s never any real chance of that, of course. As Amanda says, in what might almost be the play’s subtitle: ‘Things have a way of turning out so badly.’