Andrew Panton on directing The Glass Menagerie: 'it's one of the most beautiful plays ever written'
This autumn, Andrew Panton is following up his Edinburgh International Festival hit Make It Happen with a production of the Tennessee Williams classic The Glass Menagerie. He tells Joyce McMillan why the play remains relevant eight decades after it was first performed
It’s been a big year for Andrew Panton, the artistic director of Dundee Rep. He was a little lad growing up in Fife - and already fascinated by the idea of theatre and dance - when he first told his mother that he would like to run the Rep one day; and this summer brought him his greatest challenge since he stepped up to the job eight years ago, when the Rep worked together with the Edinburgh International Festival and the National Theatre of Scotland to produce Make It Happen, James Graham’s epic new play about Fred Goodwin and the 2008 collapse of the Royal Bank of Scotland.
Starring Brian Cox as the ghost of much-misunderstood political economist Adam Smith, and Sandy Grierson as Goodwin, the spectacular show was the centrepiece of this year’s festival theatre programme, packing the 1,700 seat Festival Theatre, selling every available ticket for its ten-day run, and playing to more than 24,000 people in Edinburgh and Dundee, where it was rehearsed and previewed.
“It was a fantastic experience,” says Panton now, “playing to audiences in Edinburgh that included so many people who had been directly affected by the RBS collapse. A couple of commercial producers have now come on board with the show, and we’re very much hoping that with a few tweaks, it will have a further life.”
Now, though, Scotland’s autumn theatre season is centre stage; and once again, Panton and Dundee Rep are stepping up with a major production - this time of Tennessee Williams’s mighty American classic The Glass Menagerie - that will not only play for three weeks in Dundee, but also tour on to the newly-reopened Citizens’ in Glasgow, and to the Lyceum in Edinburgh.
“It’s been great working in association with the Citizens’ and the Lyceum on this,” says Panton, “and particularly exciting to be part of the Citizens’ reopening season - the theatre is looking absolutely fabulous. But the impulse for the production very definitely came from us at the Rep, and from me personally.
“The Glass Menagerie has been on my list of plays that I’ve wanted to do, with a passion, since before I even arrived at Dundee. For me, it’s one of the most beautiful and perfect plays ever written, and although it first appeared in 1944, it touches on so many themes that are still vital to us today, from Tom Wingfield’s suppressed homosexuality - which he conceals even from the audience, making him a very interestingly unreliable narrator - to the extreme vulnerability of his sister Laura, who has a visible disability.
“In this production, we also have the gentleman caller, Jim, played by the wonderful black actor Declan Spaine, so we’re touching on that aspect of life in 1940s America as well. And it’s been fascinating, 80 years on, to explore Williams’s insights into those characters with a great company of 21st century actors.”
Tennessee Williams’s play famously tells the story of the the Wingfield family - mother Amanda, brother Tom and sister Laura - who are living in reduced circumstances in a dingy St Louis apartment after being abandoned by a feckless husband and father, the proverbial “telephone man who fell in love with long distance.” Tom is our narrator, haunted by memory, and riven with guilt at his own decision to leave St Louis and abandon his mother and sister; in this production, he is played by Christopher Jordan-Marshall, seen in last year’s award-winning Traverse play The History Of Paper.
Leading Scottish actress Sara Stewart plays his mother Amanda, a fading southern belle whose grip on reality seems increasingly uncertain; and the part of Laura - the sister whose fragility is symbolised by the collection of tiny glass animals she loves and cherishes - will be played by Amy Conachan, one of Scotland’s leading young actors, and a wheelchair user whose career until now - from playing science teacher Courtney Campbell in Hollyoaks, to her star turn as pirate queen Lean Jean Silver in Treasure Island at the Lyceum last Christmas - has often been all about the toughness and resilience of the characters she plays, regardless of disability.
“It’s true that I have often tended to play strong women, very confident and proud,” she says. “But when they asked me to audition for the role of Laura, they sent me that beautiful scene between Laura and gentleman caller, Jim, which is just so beautifully written in every way that I thought - I really must do this, if I can.
“And it has been challenging for me, to find that gentleness and vulnerability within myself, and to work with it - but so rewarding. It seems to me that in this play there are no villains, yet no-one is perfect, either. Amanda is a woman in a panic about what is to become of Laura, if and when Tom leaves. Tom has his own pressures and secrets. Laura is a genuinely timid and quiet soul, who just wants to be where she is, in her comfort zone. And despite all the tensions, there is this powerful affection among them all; they are a close knit family, despite everything.
“And as for touring the show from Dundee to the Citizens and Lyceum - well, there just aren’t three more iconic theatres in Scotland, and I can’t wait. I’ve appeared in them all, I love them all, and the atmosphere and audience reactions in each one are so different, it’s fascinating. I have done plenty of film and television in my career so far, but I always come back to theatre, to ground myself again. And to be taking a play as powerful and beautiful as this to these three wonderful theatres - well, I can’t imagine anything better, or more exciting.”
The Glass Menagerie is at Dundee Rep from 27 September until 18 October; at the Citizens’ Theatre, Glasgow, 21-25 October; and at the Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, 4-8 November.
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