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Most of the great plays are robust; they’ll survive the roughest treatment actors and directors can throw at them. Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie – like its characters and the tiny figurines suggested in its title – is not one of them. It’s dependent on a gossamer tonal quality so delicate that a single false note or careless gesture can threaten its effects. As Williams himself said of the central metaphor in his production notes, “how beautiful it is and how easily it can be broken”.

Director Mark Wilson is an unusual choice to helm the play; he’s an artist with a subversive streak, highly mannered and idiosyncratic. His last production for Melbourne Theatre Company was a riotous Much Ado About Nothing, and he brings something of that knockabout energy to Williams’ achingly autobiographical “memory play”. He challenges the work, which in itself is a good thing to do to the classics, even if here it often feels like someone stomping on things.

The Glass Menagerie takes place in the Wingfield household, a dingy three-room apartment presided over by the indomitable, brittle and deluded matriarch Amanda (Alison Whyte). She’s a key Williams’ type – the ageing beauty desperately trying to outrun fate – abandoned by her husband, retreating into a fantasy version of the past when she “received – 17! – gentleman callers!”

Her daughter Laura (Millie Donaldson) is a painfully shy, physically disabled recluse, fixated on the glass figurines she keeps locked in a wooden box. Dissolute son Tom (Tim Draxl) is, as he explains to us in the opening monologue, our narrator and reluctant man of the house, a poet working in a deadening warehouse job while supporting the myopic family unit.

It is when Amanda hits on a solution to the family’s narrowing circumstances that the plot, such as it is, kicks into gear. Tom will invite a colleague home for dinner, Laura’s first gentleman caller, who will presumably marry her and free Tom and Amanda in the process. Tom invites Jim (Harry McGee), “a nice, ordinary, young man” who nevertheless brings despair and destruction, fulfilling the maxim that the devil always comes in disguise. It’s a tragedy in a minor key, where the snapping of a tiny piece of glass shatters the world.

All of which requires a tonal control and directorial precision that Wilson gleefully disrupts at every turn. Taking his cue from an earlier version of the play titled The Wingfields of America, Wilson emphasises the comic in the tragicomic, encouraging a buffoonery from the cast that is fatal to the hushed, melancholic drift surging underneath the play. Anyone who saw Whyte’s steely Linda in Death of a Salesman knows she can shake with incandescently dignified rage, but here she twitters about like a sitcom mom, her desperation served up as belittling farce. Amanda is pathetic, even bathetic at times, but she emerges from, and retreats back into, a world of defiant obsolescence, defined by its haughty self composure. Here she often seems clownish and small, like a stock character from commedia dell’arte.

Draxl’s Tom is problematic too. He makes a mistake that often plagues contemporary productions of this play, by making overt the queerness that remains implied in Williams’ text. The opening of the play locates Tom in the world of Fassbinder’s Querelle and Tom of Finland, all biceps and brawn, but this undercuts the seething repression and self-hatred in the part as conceived by Williams. Donaldson fares better as the quietly majestic Laura, even if her inner strength threatens to obscure her tenuousness. McGee makes much of the shining optimism in the gentleman caller, and their long, tremulous scene together is the best in the play.

Kat Chan’s set nods to Williams’ glorious description of the Wingfield apartment as “one of those vast hive-like conglomerations of cellular living-units that flower as warty growths in overcrowded urban centres”, but it also feels awfully concrete and banal. Paul Lim’s lighting evokes the noir 40s films Tom is presumably obsessed with, and Matilda Woodroofe’s costumes are brash and daring. Marco Cher’s sound compositions are intrusive, with bizarre Bernard Herrmann-like discordances that suggest a Mrs Bates-style stabbing spree. Effects should recede like memories in The Glass Menagerie, but here they’re forced on the audience with the subtlety of a pantomime.

This is the production’s true (and only) tragedy, the utter lack of nuance and suggestion. One key example is the claustrophobia of the set. People move around the ludicrously cramped dining table with comic displays of awkwardness, but evident nowhere is the emotional claustrophobia in which Williams was really interested. Under Wilson’s direction, everything is signposted but nothing registers psychically.

The Glass Menagerie will survive. It’s a terrific vehicle for a great actor, and while Whyte is never less than compelling throughout, her performance is caged in a production that mocks the very aspects of her that most ennoble her. In this way, she’s as hopelessly confined as Laura, mourning the broken horn of a glass unicorn when the world around her is crumbling.