The Glass Menagerie

Duke of York's, London                                        Until August 27, 2hrs 30mins

Rating:

The Dance Of Death

Ustinov Studio, Bath                                     Touring until July 23, 1hr 30mins

Rating:

Amy Adams is the latest Hollywood star to crop up in the West End, making her stage debut here. Alas, for all her screen attributes – she’s a six-time Oscar nominee – she unleashes few thrills in this stodgy version of Tennessee Williams’s first big hit.

She plays Amanda, a former Mississippi belle. Adams wears a brown Oxfam cardy, patterned frock and crimped hair. She’s more fusty matron than faded magnolia. It’s hard to believe she once entertained, as she claims, 17 gentleman callers in one day.

Her husband has long since done a bunk, leaving her to nag her agonisingly shy and disabled daughter, Laura, and her son, Tom, a sulky wannabe writer in a dead-end job in a shoe factory.

Paul Hilton, as the grown-up Tom, hams up the narration of this ‘dream play’ in what looks like a bunker. Tom Glynn-Carney plays Tom’s younger self, always escaping to the movies, probably a cover for sex excursions.

Lizzie Annis – very tall and rather endearing – plays Laura. She’s lovely, lolloping about the stage with knock knees like a day-old giraffe.

But in Jeremy Herrin’s production all the actors have to compete for our attention with an overhead screen projecting soppy, soft-focus nature scenes. There’s also a huge display case that looks as if it comes at vast expense from Harrods. Why?

The animal collection Laura dotes so pathetically over is surely meant to be dime-store tat.

The famous scene in which Laura flirts with a gentleman visitor (Victor Alli), only to be hideously let down, is all frightfully tragic. But in an atmosphere of rudderless inertia, I found this Southern play’s perfumed lyricism getting up my nose.

Strindberg’s 1900 play The Dance Of Death is the grandaddy of all squabbling domestic dramas – even Basil and Sybil’s marriage in Fawlty Towers.

Hilton McRae is a passed-over Army captain (a fabulously vicious part previously played by Laurence Olivier and Ian McKellen). He and Lindsay Duncan (they’re married in real life), as his former actress wife, go at it hammer and tongs.

They are stuck on an island outpost and their marriage is a rotting corpse.

The problem is Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s adaptation, littered with modern obscenities that don’t match the period costumes.

There’s a go-between male character, here played as a woman (by Emily Bruni) who introduces a dotty, neck-biting, lesbian twist.

It’s perfectly watchable because these two lead actors are such consummate professionals. But it’s not scathingly funny enough to redeem Strindberg’s grim view of marriage as nothing but vicious warfare.