ONE OF the high-points of the current Town Hall Theatre season hits the stage next week with Tennessee Williams’s autobiographical memory play, The Glass Menagerie.
This co-production between the Town Hall and Theatrecorp is directed by Max Hafler and its cast includes local actors Sean O’Meallaigh and Ionia Ní Chroinín who take the central roles of siblings Tom and Laura - characters modelled on Tennessee Williams himself and his beloved sister Rose.
During a lunchtime break in rehearsals O’Meallaigh and Ní Chroinín shared their thoughts on the play and the characters they portray within it. O’Meallaigh began by reflecting on the fact that Menagerie is a memory play in which we see two versions of Tom, his older self who acts as narrator and the younger self who participates in its main events.
“We’re pitching it that Tom’s older self is seven/eight years older than he is when we see him in the majority of the play which is set in the late 1930s,” he reveals. “Myself and Max have discussed what might have happened him during that time, there’d have been the Second World War and we feel his experiences have maybe aged him more than a normal seven/eight years might have.
“He’s telling the story and he’s quite haunted by these figures in his memory, his mother and sister, he feels a lot of guilt regarding them and the reasons for that are expanded on in the play. He writes the play to exorcise those demons in some way. He’s particularly haunted by the memory of his sister.
“We see Tom as both his older self when he’s narrating and then his younger self in the play and from an acting point of view that’s a nice challenge because you’re wondering for instance how much has he changed and how much of him has stayed the same.”
Ní Chroinín observes of the shy, partially crippled, Laura that “she’s a fascinating character and the more you explore the play you find that she’s much stronger than you first think”.
“She has this limp that looms much larger in her own mind than for anyone else, it’s only a small defect but because it was worse in her youth it’s stayed with her,” says Ní Chroinín. “As happens with a lot of people who have anything like that that is socially not quite acceptable they retire into themselves in order that people don’t notice them.
“She’s done that but it doesn’t mean her own personality is fragile, she’s a survivor, she’s very self-preservational which is fascinating because what you see is not at all what you get with her.
“Tennessee Williams makes it very interesting for the actor because at the very start he announces this is a play of memories and they’re not all real so for the actor you realise you have a certain amount of leeway, that these aren’t completely naturalistic characters, they’re epitomising what he remembers of them so they’re maybe a bit more concentrated or distilled than you might expect.”
“All of the play’s characters cling to the past somehow,” O’Meallaigh notes. “The older Tom holds onto the guilt he feels for his younger self, their mother Amanda clings to this image of how her life was in the Deep South when they had servants, and when Tom’s friend Jim calls we learn that in high school he was top of the class but in the meantime his life has stalled somehow and in the play he spends a lot of time reminiscing about those schooldays.”
Ní Chroinín adds the interesting observation that “Tom constantly talks a lot about Laura and yet I think it’s his mother Amanda who is the really central character and it’s almost as if Tom doesn’t realise that she’s the one who is actually dominating his memories.”
The Glass Menagerie will be staged from Tuesday February 15 to Saturday 19 and also features Maria McDermottroe (Amanda ) and Marcus Lamb (Jim ). Tickets are €20/16 from the Town Hallon 091 - 569777 and www.tht.ie
