Theatre

Readers who encountered Daphne du Maurier’s ‘The Birds’ when it was first published in 1952 (as part of her short story collection The Apple Tree) would have heard in the story an echo of the German assault on Britain during World War II, images of rural England under attack from aggressive birds an apt metaphor for everything the country had recently endured. Yet what lifted the story from being merely an allegory of a past war to a tale that resonated – and continues to resonate – beyond its time is the cyclic nature of the birds’ incursions.

When I was a teenager in Melbourne in the 1980s, fretfully and privately imagining a grown-up life in which I was au courant with ‘culture’, I watched whatever arts programming the ABC threw at me. I have a very clear memory from that time of viewing a story about Anthill Theatre’s production of Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days. I saw footage of Winnie, played by Julie Forsyth, buried up to her neck and speaking, what seemed to me at the time, a whole load of nonsense. 

Ensemble Theatre’s The Glass Menagerie offers a faithful but thrilling production of Tennessee Williams’s classic play. This iteration of Williams’s ‘memory play’ retains the historical and geographical settings in which the show was first performed (1944) and it does so with attentive fidelity to its language and cadence. The characters are placed firmly in the 1930s, in St Louis. They live in genteel poverty, trapped in myriad constraints – economic, social, and emotional. While Guernica burns, as the present-day narrator Tom Wingfield (Danny Ball) explains to the audience, he works dull days in a shoe warehouse to support his delusional mother and feeble sister.

Is Henry V Shakespeare’s worst play? No, that unhappy honour goes to The Taming of the Shrew, an anti-comedy that grows more rancid with each passing year.