The Glass Menagerie introduces one of Tennessee Williams’ most legendary characters – the formidable Amanda Wingfield, a faded Southern Belle with delusions of grandeur. The year is 1937, and she’s stuck in a tiny, run-down apartment with her two adult children, the frustrated Tom and the cripplingly shy Laura. All three of them need to break free of the past. Could Laura’s ‘gentleman caller’ be their answer?

Straight from a sold-out season at Sydney’s Belvoir St Theatre, Eamon Flack’s new production subverts Williams’ own vision of The Glass Menagerie as a ‘memory play’. In real time onstage, recollections from the Wingfield apartment are converted into moments from a lost black-and-white film, as Tom re-imagines those he left behind.

Williams’ intensely vulnerable characters are poignantly realised in this production, which stars one of Australia’s greatest actresses, Pamela Rabe, in her Helpmann Award-winning role. As the play moves towards its devastating conclusion, we can only grieve for the disintegration of a family that is a stone’s throw away from collapse.