FOUR STARS

The Glass Menagerie, which gave Tennessee Williams his first big stage success, remains nearly 70 years after its premiere perhaps his most often performed work. A frank and fearless picture of the writer’s home life as it had been in St Louis, the play offers heartbeaking studies of both his mother and sister, as well as showing us his own boozy boredom stuck in a dead-end factory job.

Williams had made his big escape by the time the work struck gold. Answering the call of Hollywood, he found himself labouring, not happily, as an MGM screenwriter. John Terry, directing a gripping, well-acted, home-grown revival at Chipping Norton Theatre, takes his cue from this to present the piece — which Williams styled a “memory play” — as from a film set, with the writer’s reminiscences framing the action being performed as the cameras roll.

This transportation of the audience to Studio Six — the words stamped on the incomplete, flimsy wooden set supplied by designer Will Fricker — works extremely well. I was a little puzzled, though, by the spotlight playing on an empty frame that ought to contain a portrait of the long-absent father of the family — a “telephone man who fell in love with long distance” (a joke so good that Williams tells it twice).

A particularly felicitous touch is the filmic piano music played by actor Eamonn O’Dwyer (at least until the moment arrives for him to make his own appearance in front of the cameras). This accompanies the great rolling speeches from mother Amanda Wingfield (Flaminia Cinque) in which this fading Southern belle recalls the glories of her past, underlining that hers is an oft-given ‘performance’ on a theme very familiar to Tom (Matt Connor) and his shy, crippled sister Laura (Miranda Keeling).

Having entertained on one memorable afternoon no fewer than 17 ‘gentlemen callers’, Amanda is desperate Laura should have at least one. Her wish comes true when Tom brings home workmate Jim (Mr O’Dwyer, in his acting role). Good-hearted as he is seen to be in the long and touching scene with the pitiful young woman, it is with a sickening inevitability that we watch him shattering her fragile hopes just as surely as he does the horn on her treasured glass unicorn.

Chipping Norton Theatre Until Saturday 01608 642350