![\"Glass](\"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/08\/Glass-Menagerie-2.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nIn John Tiffany\u2019s absorbing production of The Glass Menagerie<\/em> (seen in New York in 2013, now playing at the Edinburgh International Festival), isolation is a defining note. The Wingfield family\u2019s St Louis apartment is lapped by inky water, so that the rooms appear like islands. They\u2019re marooned.<\/p>\n The Wingfields are feely \u2013 so much<\/em> feely \u2013 but rarely touchy. Cherry Jones\u2019 mother cajoles and commands; Kate O\u2019Flynn\u2019s sister halts and hides away. Neither gets huggy with Michael Esper\u2019s Tom, their respective son and brother. Tom, also the play\u2019s narrator, shares a firstname with Tennessee Williams, and is usually read as an autobiographical extension of the playwright. If the writer is gay, what of the character? Only when Seth Numrich\u2019s buoyant gentleman caller arrives, unaware that he has been set up as a suitor for sister, does the production belatedly allow physical contact. He and Tom slap each othr on the back, rest hands on each other\u2019s shoulders. It\u2019s a dude\u2019s horseplay, but each touch registers the homoerotic desire that the play overtly avoids.<\/p>\n It\u2019s a subtle note in the production, but a vital one. All the characters but Tom are placed in a romantic frame, discussing relationships past, present and potential. But what of Tom? Desire ripples through his speeches on the hot music spilling out of the dancehall, on the restless call of the sea to which he eventually succumbs. And it\u2019s there, surely, in Williams\u2019 own biography, a catalogue of brave relationships and brazen hook-ups. Without strain, Tiffany\u2019s production restores Williams\u2019 homosexuality to his breakthrough hit, makes sense of a loquacious character who doesn\u2019t quite explain himself.<\/p>\n Twenty years ago, queering the canon was all the rage. In Shakespeare, the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus in Troilus and Cressida<\/em> would seem unabashedly erotic, while the characters of Antonio (in Twelfth Night<\/em> and The Merchant of Venice<\/em>) would be shown in complicated thrall to fickle younger men. Filmed by Derek Jarman, staged by Gerard Murphy, Edward II<\/em> challenged Dr Faustus<\/em> to be considered Marlowe\u2019s most pertinent tragedy. Queer subtexts were unearthed beneath the heterosexual mechanism of The Importance of Being Earnest<\/em>, and the relationship between Leo and Otto in Coward\u2019s Design for Living<\/em> seemed erotically charged.<\/p>\n Theatre has always been a queer medium. Even early modern moralists recognised the perverse potential in the assuming of roles, playing at gender, releasing a desirous frisson into an audience. Yet the canon\u2019s plots remain apparently heteronormative: rewarding with marriage, punishing with death and disgrace.<\/p>\n Finding alternative pathways through these plays was a political project from the late 1980s onwards. It asserted that gays were always there, reclaimed some of Eng Lit\u2019s most revered writers for a new canon. We\u2019re here, we\u2019re queer, and we\u2019re not stepping out of the spotlight.<\/p>\n Supernatural perversity<\/strong><\/p>\n Post reforms to marriage and military in the west, is there a concerted political project now? The new queering of classics seems more concerned with reframing the texts to point up something that was always there. The lost-in-the-woods, supernatural perversity of A Midsummer\u2019s Night\u2019s Dream<\/em> is pure wild and whirling \u2013 so it always seems peculiar that its perversity clings to straight couplings. Making lovelorn Helena into gay Helenus, as director Emma Rice does at Shakespeare\u2019s Globe, unlocks the play\u2019s unpredictable tangles of emotion.<\/p>\n It seems like the year of Terence Rattigan, but this gay writer mostly wrote straight (in an anguished sort of a way). You might argue that only a semi-outsider\u2019s eye could delineate so sharply the chasms of marriage and misplaced affection. But Paul Miller\u2019s delightful revival of his early farce, French Without Tears<\/em>, is piqued by men being largely bewildered by women, and clinging together for homosocial warmth.<\/p>\n Just as Tiffany does with Tennessee Williams, these productions present (male, still) homosexuality as the new normal: more remarkable in its absence than presence. An implicitly gay Tom Wingfield doesn\u2019t shake up the play, or shove it into a new shape: he just helps us recognise it. I sometimes miss, I\u2019ll admit, the old anger and defiance, but maybe gay normcore is welcome?<\/p>\n