2023-09-12 23:02:43
Foto: Vienna’s English Theatre
WIEN / Vienna’s English Theatre:
THE GLASS MENAGERIE von Tennessee Williams
Premiere: 12. September 2023
When an institution that can be traced back solely to private initiative celebrates its 60th anniversary, that means something. In 1963, the American actress Ruth Brinkmann and her Austrian husband, the theater man and director Franz Schafranek, founded Vienna’s English Theater, which, following “vacant” years at the beginning, moved into the ballroom in Josefsgasse in 1974, where they still “live” today.
Initially intended primarily for tourists, the house has long since become an institution for the Viennese public. The fact that following the death of the two founders, the daughter Julia Schafranek was ready to run the theater in the spirit of her parents with undiminished quality standards, ensured the existence and continuity of the company.
Julia Schafranek has now begun the anniversary season with a top classic of American theater, “Glass Menagerie” by Tennessee Williams, premiered in Chicago in 1944, timeless in its drama. Adrienne Ferguson, which has already provided the house with many successful productions, relied on the subtitle: “A game of memories.” A lot of music (there is even a live violinist on stage) always puts the action into the unreal, makes it floatingly clear that that we experience writer Tom Wingfield’s half-transfigured and half-painful memory of his beloved sister Laura and his less beloved mother Amanda. The equipment of Sophia Linhart also deviates from sheer realism in its glass tile-like structure.
At least the first half of the play is not regarding the shy, sensitive, mobility-impaired girl Laura; who prefers to communicate with her glass figures rather than with people, the main character of the event, but her mother. Amanda was probably once a southern belle who has degenerated in every way and now can’t even live out her illusions with her two children. Here now the director and her actress Anne-Marie Piazza, who seems decidedly too young for the role of mother, didn’t make the right decision. She exaggerates the southern dialect (everyone else speaks crystal-clear English), her voice is pushed to painfully shrieking, drilling heights, and a tormenting staccato pours out of her mouth. Now Amanda Wingfield wants to gloss over her fate in a real suada, but when she is portrayed as such a pushy drama queen, with far too much egotism, far too little feeling, she loses all sympathy – and also the sympathy that she has for her tragic fate is certainly justified.
But the three young people are absolutely excellent, above all Tom Stuttard as brother / son Tom, who holds the events together brilliantly as a narrator and outlines the fate of a talented person who first has to free himself from his (family) chains before he can become an artist… who then writes this piece regarding his sister and mother.
The actual “Glass Menagerie” storyline between Laura and the visitor Jim, the articulate Irish-American young man with ambition, is brief, but that is where the magic of the piece unfolds. Louise Marie Prackwho is celebrating her stage debut here, is a Laura who never presses the tear duct and is completely convincing in her simplicity, and Peter Steele In addition to its full-bodiedness, it conveys a lot of good qualities.
Lots of applause for the quartet of actors, the director failed to collect her applause at the premiere.
Renate Wagner
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