Christopher Jordan-Marshall breathes the evening into life. Gliding into the auditorium with the house lights up, he appears as Tom Wingfield, the narrator of Tennessee Williams’s sad, autobiographical play. He meets us on our own ground and points out the artifice: behind the curtain a memory play of uncertain authority. In a striking opening, the actor is cool and reflective.
In Andrew Panton’s production, he is also defeated. Acted out on Emily James’s barest suggestion of a set – a spiral staircase, a breezy window frame, a hint of gloomy wallpaper lit in moody blues by Simon Wilkinson – it is a depressive reading of the play that the director conjures up. It is also restrained and stately.
All the fight has been knocked out of Tom, an aspiring writer scratching a living in a warehouse by day, escaping into drink and movies by night. Yes he is frustrated, but his anger is tempered.
Likewise, his mother, Amanda, is played by Sara Stewart not as a neurotic southern belle with unreasonable expectations of her children but as a disappointed woman calmly wishing the best for them. Only when she makes a grand entrance in a daffodil-yellow frock, throwing off clouds of ancient dust, does she hint at the cloying monster Tom would have her be. Mostly, she is just let down.
It is an approach that gains in quiet domestic realism what it loses in unhinged vitriol. As a result, the muted production comes into its own in the tremendous extended scene between sister Laura and her gentleman caller, Jim O’Connor.
Amy Conachan plays Laura as level-headed rather than shy: she is under no illusions about her disability. That makes her look of delight all the more moving when Declan Spaine’s Jim signs an old theatre programme for her – and her look of dejection all the more crushing when her ideal man says he wishes she were his sister.
At Dundee Rep until 18 October. Then touring until 8 November
