Die Glasmenagerie

This could be a decisive evening for Laura Wingfield, who shares a modest apartment in St. Louis with her mother Amanda and her brother Tom. Because tonight Jim is coming to visit and he presents a potential escape route from the dreary life that Laura attempts to ignore by lovingly caring for her collection of glass animals. In the end, however, not just her dreams are broken. In her lucid and sensitive production of Die Glasmenagerie, Jaz Woodcock-Stewart focuses especially on the role of women and the mechanisms of self-sacrifice and self-improvement within the family’s fragile structure. How does financial and social pressure affect the single mother and other family members? Woodcock-Stewart and her ensemble invite the audience to empathise with the characters while also offering a view behind the façade.

Jury Statement

“A soft spot for a narrative-based aesthetic is considered typical for the UK. Jaz Woodcock-Stewart is one of the young British directors who are skilled storytellers but don’t simply retell the story. She gives Tennessee Williams’ Die Glasmenagerie (The Glass Menagerie) at Theater Basel a very contemporary drive without breaking up the text – which is set in the late 1930s. Contemporary powerplates, vibrating plates from the gym, don’t exactly encourage muscle development here – on the contrary, they are ironically inverted to be congenial symbols that all the structures offering any support are being undermined. The three main characters get lost between the bare concrete walls. A staircase leads into nothingness, and a ramp down to a reduced life, with no money and no contact with the outside world. The queer daughter escapes into a kind of hikikomori existence. For one visitor to the family a (house) facade will briefly be tipped over the hollow life of the unlucky trio; it won’t do any good. A quiet, strongly symbolic and moving work!”
– Alexandra Kedves for the Theatertreffen-jury

Tothe video statement (in German)

ProgrammeBooklet (pdf, 2 MB)