Perhaps surprisingly, there hasn’t been a major London revival of Tennessee Williams’s ‘The Glass Menagerie’ since John Tiffany’s dreamy 2017 take, although that’s largely because the pandemic robbed us of Ivo van Hove’s Isabelle Huppert-starring version, which was due to come to the Barbican in 2020 and certainly isn’t any time soon, if ever.
But 2022 should give us an exciting looking new edition, as Jeremy Herrin directs the magnificent Amy Adams – six Oscar nominee, and six times robbed – as she makes her London stage debut in the role of Amanda Wingate, the monstrous southern matriarch – based on Williams’s own mother – whose suffocating love leaves her children Laura and Tom deeply emotionally scarred.
The 1944 classic – Williams’ first and arguably best hit – is famously a ‘memory play’, taking place not in the present, but in Tom’s recollection. Usually a single older actor plays both the Tom looking back on events and the Tom who enacts the events, but in Herrin’s new version the roles will be divided, with Paul Hilton playing the older Tom and Tom Glynn-Carney the younger. Newcomer Lizzie Annie – who has cerebral palsy – will play Laura, while Victor Alli will play The Gentleman Caller.