Theatre night:The Glass Menagerie.

"I didn't go to the moon. I went much further. For time is the longest distance between two places" - Tom Wingfield

"Let me take you to the movies. Can I take you to the show? Let me be yours ever truly. Can I make your garden grow?" - Houses Of The Holy, Led Zeppelin

1930s St Louis. The Wingfield family (mother Amanda, twenty something children Laura and Tom) are living in reduced circumstances and it's only the thought of the southern hospitality and the fact that they're not in Spain (at a time of the Spanish Civil War, at a time of Guernica) that's keeping them warm. 

Though warmth and comfort, in Tennessee Williams' 1944 memory play (the play, in fact, which invented that very genre) The Glass Menagerie, are very different things. A southern gothic odyssey that insidiously worms its way into your head and into your heart while at the same time never leaving the confines of the Wingfield's slightly dilapidated looking pile.

Amanda (Sharon Small) is protective of her grown up children since her husband - a 'charming' telephone worker who fell in love with "long distance" - walked out on her yet she's overbearing and domineering and can't help but criticise and admonish Tom and Laura for the admittedly poor life decisions they make. She harks back, almost constantly, to the old days when she had servants and multiple "gentleman callers". To Amanda, the past isn't a foreign country. It's home. It's the present that is alien.

Son Tom (Tom Varey), the unreliable narrator of the play, works joylessly in a shoe factory by day yet dreams of adventure and the wider world. Almost every night without exception he goes out to the movies - or so he says - and often returns slightly the worse for wear.

Sister Laura (Eva Morgan), for her part, hardly ever goes out. She's fallen out of education and fallen out of work and she stays at home listening to old phonographs and making small and delicate glass animals who 'live' on the shelves and sideboards of their home together in what Amanda calls "the glass menagerie".

Amanda, aware that Laura will not be proactive in her own life - she has crippling shyness as well as being partially physically crippled - arranges for a gentleman caller to visit the home and, hopefully, make an honest woman of Laura and when that man, Jim O'Connor (Jad Sayegh), arrives the play really starts to get moving. I was certainly moved.

Jim O'Connor (who rocks a canary yellow zoot suit like Jim Carrey in The Mask) is everything that Laura is not. He's confident, he's successful (or he's on his way to being so), and he's outgoing. Laura had confessed earlier in the play that he was the one man she'd ever had romantic feelings for but her shyness is so debilitating that when he arrives at the Wingfield house she can barely stand to be in the same room as him.

The interactions between Laura and Jim are the most tender in the entire play and I'd be lying if I didn't tell you I had to wipe my eyes dry a couple of times. When he accidentally breaks the horn off of her beloved glass unicorn and she gives it to him as a souvenir it is an act of genuine kindness. But as we know from life acts of genuine kindness are not always reciprocated.

Will it work out for Jim and Laura? Will Tom, in his threadbare suit, ever find the adventure he so desperately craves? Will Amanda ever escape her past and the ghost of her absent husband? The Glass Menagerie will not offer easy answers but it will offer relatable ones as it tackles the deathless themes of memory, time's passing, family, loneliness, and affairs of the heart while at the same time making very good use of the music of Andy Williams (Can't Get Used To Losing You), The Cure (Pictures Of You), and Shakespears Sister (you'll find out why if you go and see it). 

A bravura performance from all concerned in a wonderful adaptation by director Jay Miller of what to me feels like a timeless story. Props to for the Yard Theatre in Hackney Wick which is a great, and unexpected, space for theatre. This is its last production for a while but thankfully not ever. The Yard Theatre isn't closing down but rebuilding itself, this time double the size. Theatres can be rebuilt but hearts can break just as easily as a glass unicorn.