The Glass Menagerie, review: a post-pandemic study in isolation and dangerous illusions

There is a simple litmus test for the success of a Menagerie production: whether or not it leaves the audience in pieces. Atri Banerjee's revival enters a crowded field – the West End's Amy Adams vehicle has only just finished – yet his graceful, slow-release production of Tennessee Williams's memory play about an adult son looking back on his long-vanished family excellently restates the case for it as an agonising study in dangerous illusions.

Banerjee's carefully stylised approach - there are no props except chairs and no glass menagerie either beyond a single tiny unicorn - leaves open the extent to which the world the Wingfield family inhabit might exist in their minds. Laura, for instance, the frightened, reclusive daughter played by Rhiannon Clements who has a foreshortened left arm, quite visibly doesn't have a walking impairment. Stripped of the usual cloying Southern claustrophobia, a modern post-pandemic atmosphere hangs suggestively in the air. These are people isolated not just from reality but from each other.

Yet the detailed expressionism never gets in the way of vividly human performances. Geraldine Somerville, who played Laura in 1989 at this same venue, captures many of the infuriating contradictions of Amanda, the trilling, overbearing matriarchal fantasist who combines a pragmatic determination to secure stable futures for her children with a failure to understand how her needy loneliness is in fact destroying them.

Joshua James's Tom, who finds all the play's savage humour, is a spewing fountain of restless sour fury, caught between fantastical dreams of escape and his deep complicated love for his mother and sister. Most revealingly, Clements adds an extra dimension to the fragile Laura. When Jim, her gentleman caller (an equable Eloka Ivo), suggests they dance to the music drifting from the nearby Paradise Music Hall, she imagines an exuberant sexy duet to Whitney Houston's One Moment in Time, revealing a glimpse of the spirited, confident girl she so easily could be.

Jim, Tom and Laura are in modern dress while Amanda flits about in Southern finery, as though stuck forever in a long-lost antebellum past. There is a Chekhovian sense of these people adrift from the moment in which they live while that same history, with all its threat of incipient seismic change, ominously bears down. Yet the production, set to a continuous lulling score and beautifully lit, also captures the play's curious ineffable quality, halfway between memory, dream and something entirely imagined. Heart-wrenching.

Until Oct 8. Tickets: 0161 8339833; royalexchange.co.uk