Young and restless: STC and MTC’s Jumpy

April de Angelis’ Jumpy is a strange play. At once about Hilary approaching fifty and the impending sense of a mid-life crisis that follows her around, it also follows Hilary’s relationship with her often-wayward fifteen-year-old daughter Tilly, and the accompanying dramas, struggles, and battles which seem to follow her around. Claimed to be “the funniest new play the West End has seen in ages” when it premiered in London in 2012, it comes across here as blunt, unsubtle, and coarse, and it makes for a rather long and tedious two-and-a-half hours of theatre.

Blue roses and unicorns: Belvoir’s The Glass Menagerie

Tennessee Williams described The Glass Menagerie as a “memory play” – a play based on memory as much as one which unfolds from and like one. Its world is a private one, where “desire clashes with obdurate reality, [and] where loss supplants hope.” It is a play borne out of sadness and perhaps regret, a play about what might have been, what could have been, and it is in many respects a quiet play, Williams’ “first… and perhaps [his] last.” But out of this quietness, this inwardness, comes a desperate cry for help, for compassion and understanding, “so long as we are there to listen.” Belvoir’s The Glass Menagerie, directed by Eamon Flack, plays with the illusion of memory and truth, indeed with the illusion of illusion, and it is a play – a production – that is very much haunted. Haunted, autobiographically and in performance, by the character of Laura. Based on the plight of Williams’ sister Rose – whose fate had been decided by institutionalised care following a lobotomy – the play, and Laura, blossoms where Rose can and could not, and even though it is a heartbreaking portrait of a brother trying to give the outside world to the sister he loves even if she isn’t able to leave her own private world, it is a play ultimately about love, relationships and dreams.