The theatrical work of Tennessee Williams is currently interpreted with finesse by Isabelle Huppert currently in Paris.

An inventor of theatrical forms

Tennessee Williams is so famous for cinema that we sometimes forget that he was first and foremost an inventor of theatrical forms. He designed The Glass Menagerie, his first great success, as a “memory play”: everything takes place there in the memory of Tom, on the stage of his youth, a family camera that he fled. Nothing vaporous here: this mental world is also that, without perspective, of a southern United States haunted by its own myth and ravaged by the crisis. Despite the resemblance of fiction to his own life, Williams always claimed the transfiguration of reality as the real stake of his art. A resistance through poetry with which he also endows his characters, made of their dreams as much as of their reality: Laura, the sister, a refugee in her inner world; Tom, still “at the cinema”, perhaps caught up in adventures where Ivo van Hove guesses a parallel life, with boys; Amanda, the mother, barricaded in the idealization of the past and in the love for her children. A fusional family, linked by a common vulnerability, which the visit of a friend of Tom will cause to implode. For Ivo van Hove, their fragility recounts the political and economic harshness of the 1930s. His staging marries the tension of the writing between harshness and phantasmagoria.

A beautiful glass menagerie

He entrusted Isabelle Huppert with the role of Amanda : only she, he said, could give him all her strength of resilience – “like a phoenix rising from its ashes”. The play, which opens with a turn of magic breaking the fourth wall, presents itself as the sensitive simulacrum of a world cradled in illusions: those of its characters, and those that govern the staging, perfectly reflecting the poetic imperfection of dreams and memories. beautiful.

duration : 2h

Tuesday to Saturday at 8 p.m., Sunday at 3 p.m. break monday additional performances on Saturday 10 and 17 December at 3 p.m. performance with French surtitles on Friday, December 9 performances with audio description on Thursday 8 and Sunday 11 December (the model of the show set will be presented one hour before the performance in audio description)

Theatre de l’Odeon

Place de l’Odeon – Paris

https://www.theatre-odeon.eu/fr/saison-2022-2023/spectacles-22-23/la-menagerie-de-verre_22