No spaces left on my culture dance-card this week

         We were expecting visitors from New York this week, but the cloud of volcanic ash (if there actually was one - Sunday's national newspapers cast doubt on whether it existed or was dreamt up by bureaucrats) kept them away. So I nearly ended up with five tickets to see Shared Experience's production of The Glass Menagerie at Oxford Playhouse. I realized during the first scene that I'd never before seen this great Tennessee William's four-hander, with this terrifically difficult role for the abandoned wife-cum-smothering mother, Amanda Wingfield, who has come down so far in the world, from her prosperous adolescence in the Mississippi Delta to her present penury in a St Louis tenement. It was played in frenzied fashion by Imogen Stubbs (Lady [Trevor] Nunn), living on her memories of Cotillion and coming out balls, supported only by the meager earnings of her son, Tom (the playwright's original name), who is forced to work in a shoe warehouse, where he hides in the lavatory to write poems.  Patrick Kennedy made a good fist of this, and distanced it from the autobiographical by giving us a butch Tom, with no hint of camp, or clue that his character has anything to do with a gay playwright.

         Polly Teale's direction must have had something to do with this; it enriches the play enormously to detach it from its creator, as do the film clips flashed up backstage, which let us see the previous life of Amanda. Kyle Soller gave a fine performance as the Gentleman Caller, a specialized type of human being regarded as having messiah-potential by Amanda, worried that her cripple daughter Laura will be an old maid. In this unforgiving role Emma Lowndes was near perfect, making credible both Laura's terminal shyness, and her brief blossoming into beauty and wit. Laura and Tom are difficult roles, speech-wise, for British actors; they have to get that strange St Louis Midwestern twang with its drawling hint of the Mississippi river. But Amanda has a killer dialect, the deepest southern of all, the Delta drawl, in which every vowel is a diphthong, there are no Rs in the middles or ends of words, and the spring flower that looks like a daffodil is called a "john-kweel." It's hard to sustain and, more important, hard to project - and, as it uses up more breath than less exotic accents, hard to speak rapidly. Ms Stubbs did her considerable best with it.

         Naomi Dawson's clever set caught the pinched apartment space well, and the stairs of the fire escape gave the actors plenty of interesting vertical motion. But what impressed me most was the humaneness of the play. The Gentleman Caller arouses Laura, but he's not a callous bastard type - he's actually kind and considerate, and really does see her true worth; their scene together is touching without being sentimental or melodramatic. All the more remarkable, when we know that Williams drew her from his wickedly lobotomized sister, Rose - he's put an awful lot of aesthetic distance between her and the character. And if Amanda is drawn from the life from his mother, Edwina, in Tom Williams has created a good deal more than an alter ego. Having also seen his wonderful, "lost" early play, Spring Storm, at the National Theatre a few weeks ago, my admiration for Williams as an artist has increased hugely. His "creative writing" teacher at Iowa told him to bin it, which makes my suspicion of creative writing courses increase equally hugely.