Yet of the two Williams plays, it is The Glass Menagerie that continues to consistently command the attention of American performers and audiences. The Glass Menagerie, by contrast, was ranked 25th. In 1998, London’s Royal National Theatre invited a group of critics and theater professionals to list 10 English-language plays written in the 20th century that they regarded as “significant”: Streetcar was the third most frequently cited (after Death of a Salesman and Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, the No. This ubiquity may come as a surprise to those who take for granted that Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desireis the better play.
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No, the prize goes to Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie, which was first performed in 1944 and has received 23 professional productions in this country since the turn of the 21st century. What was it? Not Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, not Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night, not even Thornton Wilder’s perennially popular Our Town.
Still, it was surprising, in this day and age, to hear just how immature some members of the audience were in their reaction with their very loud gasps and hysterical giggling.Of the 10 plays most frequently produced by professional American theater companies in the past decade, only one (not counting the works of Shakespeare) was written prior to 1990. Sixty years on the scene has lost none of its shock-value. The cause of the ban was the scene where Eddie kisses Rudolpho on the lips in a warped attempt to convince his niece that Rudolpho is gay. The Comedy Theatre was turned into a club and audiences had to pay to become members before they could buy tickets. The Lord Chamberlain banned the play at its London premiere in 1956. The final act of revenge is totally non-realistic with the actors in a tight rugby scrum and blood raining down on them. When Marco (Emun Elliott) raises a chair by only one of its legs, high above his head, he holds it for such a very long time that it becomes as much a statement as the Statue of Liberty is a statement. The production is often deliberately artificial.
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The actors are free to give big performances, big enough to fill an amphitheatre. The story line, however, is as gripping and as powerful as ever. The stage is stripped bare and remains an empty space. His production, originally seen at the Young Vic last year, may irritate some people because he gets rid of all the domestic detail and realism which Miller put into the play to disguise its Greek Tragedy origins. “When I do a play,” says the Belgian director Ivo van Hove, “I want to do it in the most extreme way possible.” As Eddie heads faster and faster towards the precipice, it becomes all the more horrifying, because there is nothing anybody can do to stop the disaster. He lusts after his seventeen-year-old niece (Phoebe Fox), who is in love with Rudolpho, an illegal immigrant (Luke Norris), and in the true Greek tragic manner, it is this fatal flaw in his character, which drives him to do a terrible thing and destroy not only himself but also the lives of others.Īll the best Greek tragedies have their own relentless momentum. Norris (Rodolpho) Emun Elliott (Marco) Phoebe Fox (Catherine) and Mark Strong (Eddie)Įddie Carbone (Mark Strong) works in the docks in New York.
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