The MTC’s electrifying, searing take on The Glass Menagerie

THEATRE
The Glass Menagerie ★★★★
MTC, Sumner Theatre, until June 5

The last time I saw The Glass Menagerie – on the West End, starring Amy Adams – the performances were so lacking in dramatic alchemy, I walked out at interval. With this vigorous revival at the MTC, director Mark Wilson has crafted the perfect palate cleanser – a moody, playful, memorably performed production of Tennessee Williams’ classic memory play.

True, our narrator isn’t usually as butch-looking as Tim Draxl. His Tom strides onstage, a thin singlet straining to contain his ripped physique, and immediately makes a crude gesture that suggests he’s cruising for sex. For a moment there, we get Tom Wingfield as imagined by Tom of Finland.

It’s the only open acknowledgement of Tom’s homosexuality: as a character in the play, the younger Tom is closeted, cagey, and constantly lying to his mother about going “to the movies” at night. He burns to write poetry and seek adventure, but he’s stuck working in a shoe factory to help keep the lights on in the small St Louis flat he shares with his “crippled” sister Laura (Millie Donaldson) and single mother Amanda (Alison Whyte).

A musclebound Tom is also a plausible reaction to the male abandonment hanging over the household.

As Amanda’s smothering maternal anxiety drives her children to distraction, a blurred photograph of Tom and Laura’s absent father dominates the scene, preserving only an idealised outline of masculinity – strong brow and jawline, whiter-than-white smile; nothing human or wounded at all.

There’s not much stage left for human and wounded things when Amanda herself takes over. The faded Southern belle genuinely cares about her children, but her nostalgia consumes her and she’s still geared to a lost world of “gentleman callers” and “gracious living” with lots of “servants”. Ahem.

Whyte effortlessly captures the poignancy and ridiculousness of all that while underlining the driving anxiety which motivates Amanda.

Ultimately, fears for her children’s future – especially for Laura, who lives with disability – plot a course for patriarchal games and inadvertent cruelty, even as Tom plans his own act of abandonment.

Turbulent scenes between Amanda and Tom are electrifying to watch, and there’s a subtle, almost incestuous edge to their conflict that invests otherwise funny and familiar family dynamics with an unsettling charge.

If mother and son bring out the drama queen in each other, the figure of Laura remains avoidant, aloof until literal darkness descends, when Donaldson lends poise to a doomed and delicate encounter by candlelight, wreathed in sentiment, heavy symbolism, and quiet kindness in the face of yearning and despair.

It’s a poignant, faithful, and skilled production of The Glass Menagerie that delivers the play with a clarity ideal for newcomers to Tennessee Williams, and a distinctiveness that will satisfy aficionados of his work.
Reviewed by Cameron Woodhead

MUSIC
TISM ★★★★
Port Melbourne Industrial Centre for the Arts, May 2

TISM fans don’t cheer to show their appreciation; they boo. They boo as the lights go down, they boo between songs, and when TISM depart at the end of the night, they really boo. When they’re not booing, they’re chanting: “TISM are wankers.”

Perversity is the love language of TISM – the cultish, seven-piece band of semi-anonymous, masked men, who have been aerobically performing over tongue-in-cheek electro-rock since 1982.

Tonight, the Melbourne anarchists have packed out the 5000 capacity PICA in Port Melbourne, a warehouse space that feels like a shed teleported from the old Big Day Out – apt for a group that hit their cultural apex in the mid-’90s with the likes of Greg! The Stop Sign!! and He’ll Never Be An (Ol’ Man River).

The festival feel is bolstered by an undercard of six bands, and the afternoon “international theatrical debut” of TISM’s Death To Art Live at Sidney Myer Music Bowl film.

After watching technicians pootle about on stage, the headliners finally emerge – on a smaller stage behind us at the opposite end of the warehouse. We’ve been ambushed. Dressed in silly, angular NFL-style grey jumpsuits, their patented masks augmented by three huge spiked horns flopping about, the band launch into Old Skool TISM, its chorus – “Wisdom’s useless, age a prison / But let’s escape with old-school TISM” – a neat review of the crowd’s intentions.

I’ll Ave Ya sees band members furiously chest-bump each other, then in the catchy Everybody Needs Somebody to Hate, a 12-foot inflatable glowing TISM doll walks through the crowd.

Co-frontman Ron Hitler-Barassi launches into a poetic diatribe about class, racism and ketamine, before suddenly the band appear behind us on the main stage, for the acid techno-tinged, Garbage. Things have escalated.

This discombobulating stage switcheroo continues every five or six songs. Then, after a punky Death to Art, the band (bands?) somehow – hilariously – swell in number to appear on three different stages simultaneously. Playing three different songs, all at once. Chaos.

Throw in another “TISM are wankers” chant, then hectic techno closer, Give Up for Australia, performed by two TISMs on two stages facing each other. Slightly out of sync for good measure. Then they’re gone and the boos rain down in triumph.

“That was incredible,” someone says on the way out. “Now I don’t need to go and meet up with my idiot drunken friends.” Four decades on, TISM continue to serve.
Reviewed by Marcus Teague

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