'The thrill of shattered glass and the piercing pain of unfulfilled longing: this revival by Braham Murray resounds with the high-pitched sound of both' The Times - Sam Marlowe 'Menagerie is a claustrophobic play about people struggling to get away from the harsh realities of their circumstances and live their dreams. It is as much about the post-Depression American Dream as it is about personal aspiration.' Guardian - Lyn Gardner 'If ever a play were informed by its author's biography, it is Tennessee William's memory play, a delicate, almost Chekhovian drama flecked with regret and guilt. Like the narrator, young Tom Wingfield, Williams undertook a Houdini-like disappearing trick to escape his family in St Louis and become a writer. Like Tom, he could never entirely blow the candle of memory out. It flickers and splutters through all his best work.' Guardian - Lyn Gardner 'The play works its melancholy magic' Guardian - Lyn Gardner 'Williams's blunt reminder about the fragility of hope' Evening Standard - Fiona Mountford, 18.11.10 '[Williams's] forte was poignant psychological detail seen through a prism of laughter' Guardian - Michael Billington, 18.11.10 'A "memory play", dealing in reality remembered and so coloured by emotion' Financial Times - Sarah Hemming, 19.11.10 'Williams caught the self-sufficiency of provincial America, its economic rigour and its social restraint' Daily Mail - Quentin Letts, 19.11.10 'On the face of it, an autobiographical Depression tale, but its themes are universal: hope, fragility, trapped lives' The Times - Libby Purves, 19.11.10 'The 1944 play that propelled him into the major league of American dramatists' Independent - Paul Taylor, 19.11.10 'Tennessee Williams's most fond and disturbing play' Observer - Susannah Clapp, 21.11.10 'A truth about Williams's own leaving of his family will be told through the story of a lame girl who is crippled with shyness, her ambitious fantasist of a mother, the brother who wants to escape, a boy who calls, and some transparent, barely touchable animal ornaments' Observer - Susannah Clapp, 21.11.10 'The near-misses and half-truths of this play about lost love go straight to the heart' Observer - Susannah Clapp, 21.11.10 'Melancholy is woven into the fabric of Tennessee Williams's 1944 play' Sunday Times - Maxie Szalwinska, 21.11.10 'The most touching, tender and painful of his works' Daily Telegraph - Charles Spencer, 23.11.10 '[The play] has a poetry and compassion about it that rings constantly true, with passages that cut to the heart like a knife'...'A masterpiece.' Daily Telegraph - Charles Spencer, 23.11.10 'One of the greatest theatrical achievements of illusion and disappointment' Time Out London - Robert Shore, 25.11.10
