London round-up: The Glass Menagerie, Retrograde and Apex Predator
I went to London, saw some shows and had some thoughts.
I’m still in London, where my week has largely been taken up with watching shows and reacquainting myself with the press night carousel.
My interview with director Maria Aberg is in The Stage this week, talking about her company Projekt Europa, which does excellent work supporting and mentoring migrant theatre makers, and the power of art - and artists - to help up imagine a better of future.
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The Glass Menagerie, Yard Theatre
The Yard, a pop-up theatre turned Hackney Wick fixture, will close its doors later this year, with a larger, shinier and better equipped premises due to open in 2026. Since 2011, the theatre has established itself a space for experimental and aesthetically striking work. It’s where Alexander Zeldin’s Beyond Caring started out life, where Vinay Patel transplanted the Cherry Orchard to a space station, Jeff James staged Greek tragedy in a pool of treacle and where, last time I was there, a couple rocked up in fetish gear to a performance of James Fritz’s The Flea who looked in no way out of place, which I think says something about the Yard’s vibe.
The last production in the original site is artistic director Jay Miller’s own production of The Glass Menagerie, Tennessee Williams’ glittering memory play, which seems a fitting choice as the building is already in the process of coming undone (including a power outage that took place while we were in the bar).
In keeping with past Yard productions, Miller’s production is a real looker. There are bricks and sandbags scattered around Cécile Tremolières’ set giving it a half-constructed quality. We’re in the terrain of memory, not quite now, not quite then. Among the debris, there’s a well-worn chaise longue, a wardrobe (which is also a portal) and a dainty, tiered stand on which Laura’s menagerie dangles like a chandelier. The costumes are even more striking. The work of designer Lambdog1066’ (who also kitted out the characters in The Flea at the same venue), they are padded and patched, with unexpected bulges and ruffles, which convey something about the characters. Jim (Jad Sayegh), the gentleman caller wears a pair of jaunty jonquil-coloured trousers with matching braces and Laura (Eva Morgan) wears a puff-sleeved, duck-egg dress and silver shoes, which makes her look as if she is framed by petals, a blue rose in human form. (I found the costumes a little distracting at times in The Flea but here they contribute to the show’s dreamy sheen).
What really elevates this production, however, is the way Miller pairs this visual fizziness with emotional lucidity and immense tenderness. Wingfield matriarch Amanda (Sharon Small) is not the dominant and overbearing figure with a habit of romanticising the past she is sometimes portrayed as being, rather a woman whose worry about the future happiness of her children sometimes leads her to fuss over them too much. There’s a warmth to her relationship with both her high-strung son Tom (Tom Varey) and daughter Laura, and even though there are sometimes sparks between them, you can feel her concern for their wellbeing, her need to see them right in life.
Morgan’s Laura is very much coded as being neurodivergent – she even dons a pair of ear defenders when things get too much – which is a reading of the text that makes complete sense (though I don’t know of any productions that have made it this explicit), reframing her overwhelming shyness, her fixation with her collection of glass animals and the solace she gets from her Victrola - Stay by Shakespeare’s Sister is, aptly, a favourite track. Morgan captures her palpable anguish when pushed out of her comfort zone as well as the ways in which she masks it. As a result, when her tiny glass unicorn is damaged, we grasp the depth of her loss and share her distress. You feel for her so completely. I can’t remember ever seeing a production in which that moment felt so devastating.
There’s a translucency to the whole thing, a gossamer quality. Nothing feels solid. The characters sometimes emerge Narnia-like from the wardrobe. Tom is given to sudden bursts of energy, using a spray gun to cover the back wall in teal paint or dashing around the place with a headtorch on. Snatches of song drift across the stage. During the crucial scene between Laura and Jim, the stage is strewn with candles, illuminating their faces. It’s a scene of delicacy and quiet beauty, as hypnotic as it is heart-breaking, as Jim slowly and patiently coaxes her out of her shell. The Yard is still mostly known as a new writing venue (and I’ll admit, going in, a bit of my brain was asking if I really wanted to see another Glass Menagerie in this theatre of all places), but Miller can clearly navigate the classics. He makes Williams’ play feel fresh and he does so while displaying real care towards its characters. I’ve seen a lot of things over the years at the Yard that have looked fucking cool, or that have done cool things with form, but this was the first time I’ve left that theatre feeling so moved, so emotionally side-swiped.
Retrograde, Apollo Theatre
On the one hand, Ryan Calais Cameron’s Retrograde feels like a very different beast to his play For Black Boys Who Have Considered Suicide When the Hue Gets Too Heavy, a joyous and energetic exploration of Black masculinity which emerged from the dinky New Diorama in 2023 before storming the West End. That was a free-flowing act of soul-exposure in which six cast members shared anxieties about mental health and self-image. Retrograde, which originated in north London’s Kiln Theatre before making its own journey to the West End, is a more conventional piece of writing, a taut, talky three-hander about a young Sidney Poitier, and the pressures he faced at the start of his career. But there’s a clear thematic overlap. This is a play about being seen, a play about a man making a decision about who he is, a play about principles and what it means – and what it takes - to stick to them,
The play kicks off with puppyish young screenwriter Bobby (Oliver Johnstone) and studio lawyer Mr Parks (Stanley Townsend) discussing Poitier in his absence (including an exchange about his skin colour and the fact he’s not just Black, but really Black, “double-Black”) Ostensibly Poitier’s just coming in to sign the contract that will propel him to the next level of his career, following his acclaimed appearance in Blackboard Jungle, but Parks, who initially seems only loosely aware of who Poitier is, gradually reveals his agenda.
Their early exchanges are awkward, with Parks cajoling Poitier into having a drink he doesn’t want, then pressing him to speak in his old accent, essentially forcing him to perform. Director Amit Sharma nails the atmosphere of polite unease in these scenes, as Poitier plays along while also patiently explaining his professional principles, including his refusal to play passive, reactive characters.
Then Parks starts to grill him on his political beliefs – does he have communist sympathies? – before eventually presenting him with an ultimatum. If he wants to progress, he needs to sign a loyalty oath, affirming his commitment to American values and publicly denouncing the Black actor and activist Paul Robeson, a man for whom Poitier has huge admiration. Parks makes things plain. The future he dreams of is available to him, his talent will be recognised and doors will be opened, but only if he plays ball and plays nice, keeps his head down and his mouth shut - only if he abides by their rules.
The play essentially hangs on this moment – will he sign on the line or stick to his principles, risking his career in the process? We know the answer, but Poitier, as written by Calais Cameron, doesn’t, so he’s able to milk every drop of tension from the scenario while making us appreciate Poitier’s anguish - and fury - about being put in such a position.
Retrograde is one of those plays which zooms in on a notable figure at a pivotal moment in their career. (One Night in Miami was this quadrupled). It has the zippy, zingy energy of one of those films about the film industry of which Hollywood used to be so fond, while at the same time, the set up - three men verbally sparring in a hot room – has a very Mamet-y quality, something amplified by the presence of Townsend, who played Shelley Levene in Sam Yates’ 2017 production of Glengarry Glen Ross, and is here engaged in another act of salesmanship, only this time a man’s soul is at stake.
Townsend’s performance contains just the right level of menace under the studio mogul sheen – it’s a one note role but he really knows how to strike that note, gradually ratcheting things up while keeping his temper level. Johnstone shows how the well-intentioned Bobby clearly considers himself an ally, while allowing his own ambition and hunger for the big time to weaken his resolve. When faced with Percy in full flow, he looks increasingly out of his depth. The show really belongs to Ivanno Jeremiah though, as the young Poitier. It’s a performance of immense restraint. Jeremiah’s delivery is full of little hitches of disbelief and his eyes occasionally glitter with tears as he digests what’s being asked of him, and why. While it’s a very contained performance, in the moments when he does let loose, when he declares loudly and deliberately, that “I am angry” his words ring out like bells. (There were cheers on the night I saw it).
On a structural level, this is a very tidy piece of writing. That’s not a criticism. It’s really elegantly executed, neatly scattering around biographical details as well as references to HUAC and McCarthy, while never making the exposition too overt. It’s also an incredibly resonant piece of writing, a play about then that very much speaks to now in its depiction of a man coming to understand what lines he isn’t prepared to cross, that that he will no longer live his life to make white people comfortable, and that he is prepared to let the world know that.
Apex Predator, Hampstead Theatre
There’s a bright red thread connecting new motherhood with vampirism. Bram Stoker compared the image of Mina with her face at Dracula’s breast to a nursing baby, and what is a mother’s milk if not lifeforce in liquid form? It makes total sense for John Donnelly’s new play to intertwine the story of one woman’s struggle to cope after the birth of her child with a vampire narrative; it’s surprising it isn’t done more often and I was very much up for it.
Donnelly is clearly interested in the weird, wild time that follows the birth of a child, when a woman’s body is not yet her own, and lacks of sleep makes you feel out of sync with the world. Apex Predator is at once a postpartum allegory and a supernatural thriller featuring actual fucking vampires.
Following the birth of her second child, Mia’s body is still out of whack. She still hasn’t had a period (or a decent shit) since then and she’s hardly getting any sleep. Her upstairs neighbour plays loud music at all hours and her husband John is hardly ever there, engaged in covert surveillance work the details of which he can’t discuss with her, but which happen to coincide with a spate of bodies that have been turning up in the Thames drained of blood. To add to her problems, their young son Alex, who is given to wandering silently around the house in a variety of sinister masks, has also recently taken to biting his classmates.
Mia’s confidence is further frayed by the array of micro-and-very-much-macro hostilities that women face on a day-to-day basis, from shouty louts on phones who think nothing of yelling at a woman with a baby to the dude who whips his dick out in the park and orders her to look at it. Then Mia (one letter away from Mina) encounters Ana, her son’s charismatic primary school art teacher, and is soon in thrall to her, captivated by her mixture of kindness and a give-no-shits attitude, by the fact that little seems to scare her, even though she is a bit weirded out by her Hand That Rocks the Cradle offer to breastfeed Mia’s baby.
The play shares some DNA with Morgan Lloyd Malcolm’s Mum, in which Sophie Melville, who plays Mia, also played a struggling, sleep-deprived recent mother. Anyone who saw that, or the phenomenal Iphigenia in Splott, knows that Melville is an actor who can do primal. While she anchors this play with a suitably intense performance, she doesn’t get to let rip in quite the same way here.
As Ana, Laura Whitmore pairs a surface friendliness with a faint edge of menace, but she doesn’t wholly convince as a centuries old being who can namedrop Burbage and who has watched cities burn (but then who, aside from Tilda Swinton, would?) Alongside them, Leander Deeney plays an array of amusingly caricatured twats who fully deserve to have their jugular punctured.
In the programme note, Donnelly mentions that there is a longer, or at least significantly different, version of this long-in-gestation play in existence which might account for the fact some of its more intriguing ideas – the existential threat posed to vampires by climate change, for example, or that Alfie has some kind of telepathic powers. or that Ana has long outlived her own children – feel underexplored. In its current form, the play runs to a little over an hour and a half - including an interval - which doesn’t leave much room for digression. (Basically, I wanted more lore).
Donnelly and McIntyre previously collaborated on a deliciously minimalist production of The Seagull for Headlong in which a large plank was used to add a see-sawing sense of trepidation and unsteadiness to proceedings. It was a visual device which aligned perfectly with the text. Here the production struggles to navigate the shifts in tone and register. Partly this is a visual thing. Melville spends a lot of time bobbing around holding one of those uncanny yet also oddly lumpen stage babies (I was fully hoping we were going to get some sort of hallucinatory Trainspotting moment with this baby, but no). Tom Piper’s functional set takes the form of an anonymous middle class kitchen framed by scaffolding poles, plus a couple of sliding opaque screens which allow for set changes but feel otherwise underused. We occasionally get blasts of Faithless’ Insomnia and Aphex Twin’s Come to Daddy but this is aural garnish and is nowhere near enough to unsettle. The production never really lets loose on the horror front. Yes, some of the red stuff gets splashed about and Ana displays her power in a scene that feels playfully indebted to The Lost Boys, but there’s always a sense it’s holding back, that it's reticent to really embrace its own tropes.
As a writer, Donnelly can do funny and perhaps, as a consequence, the production feels far more comfortable when the characters are delivering gags about Sugababes and Mumsnet then with the actual vampire stuff, too often it skews towards the safer terrain of comedy. But for the play’s final scenes to work you need to believe that Mia believes she’s becoming something else, that she’s undergoing some form of transformation, and the production just doesn’t sell it. I was never scared by Mia - or for her - and that fatally undercuts the potency of the premise.
This week in European theatre
A round-up of festivals, premieres and other upcoming events over the next seven days.
Container - Billed as “Philip Glass’ Einstein on the Beach for the Digital Age,” this multi-vocal performance by Alan Fielden about the various crises the world is facing, plays London’s New Diorama - the theatre where Ryan Calais Cameron’s For Black Boys started out - from 2nd-12th April.
National Theatre of Greece Showcase – The third edition of the National Theatre of Greece’s annual showcase features a varied programme of work, including Yannis Moschos’ production of Matthew Lopez’s epic The Inheritance, and also coincides with the European Theatre Convention Conference and the annual meeting of the International Association of Theatre Critics. The showcase takes place in Athens between 3rd to 7th April.
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead – Polish Nobel-winner Olga Tokarchuk’s eco-novel has already been the basis for an acclaimed show by Complicité, now director Ola Mafalani is staging a fresh version with a Latvian creative team, premiering at the Dailes Theatre in Riga on 4 April.
Thanks for reading! If you have any feedback, tips, thoughts or other comments you can reach me on natasha.tripney@gmail.com
Natasha! Your writing about these shows puts me right in the theatre. I hope The Glass Menagerie makes its way to the US, oh god it sounds stunning. Apex Predator sounds fascinating and frustrating - love to see that as well. Excelllent writing!