By Helen Musa

Canberra Repertory is about to embark on its most ambitious show of the 2026 season, The Glass Menagerie, and it has a world expert on Tennessee Williams at the helm of the production.

That expert is Geoff Borny, former reader and head of theatre studies at ANU and co-founder, with Tony Turner, of Papermoon Productions.

Borny, who wrote his PhD thesis on Williams, is one of the world’s most quoted scholars on the subject and his essay, The Two Glass Menageries: Reading Edition and Acting Edition, was featured in Harold Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations volume in 1988, dedicated to the play.

Not a piece of mawkish realism, there is, Borny perceives, an element of existential exploration in the work, Williams’ first great success in the theatre.

While, to many people, the lasting memory of the play is of the faded southern belle mother and her fragile daughter Laura, he is clear that The Glass Menagerie is a memory play. All those memories belong to Tom Wingfield, an adult merchant seaman looking back on the life he escaped in St Louis.

For this reason, daringly, Borny has cast a mature actor, Rob de Fries, for the pivotal role of Tom and it puzzles that Tom is often played by actors as young as 19.

He acts as both the narrator and a younger character, in the opening scene warning the audience that his memory is subjective, saying: “Yes, I have tricks in my pocket, I have things up my sleeve. But I am the opposite of a stage magician… I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion.”

Borny sees Tom acting as the director, sometimes addressing the audience directly and sometimes stepping back into the action. He sets the scenes, introduces the characters and, by inviting an old school friend, Jim (John Whinfield), to dinner, sets the plot in motion.

If not exactly Theatre of the Absurd, it is a play about how humans make meaning of their lives, whether through Tom’s need to escape and have adventures, Amanda’s (Victoria Tyrell Dixon) vision of herself as a southern belle or Laura’s (Jamie Johnston) retreat into the world of little glass animals.

“The published version we are using is a bit different from the one that made him famous,” Borny says.

“What Williams is trying for is not a tearjerker, but a magical world, and he uses every theatrical device he can to achieve that.”

Borny admits that a substantial amount of The Glass Menagerie is autobiographical, but believes the audience doesn’t necessarily need to know that. It’s clear that Amanda knows her son Tom, like Williams, is gay but being 1944, “It’s not talked about, but it’s hinted at strongly in the script.” 

For the record, Williams was born Thomas Lanier Williams and his sister Rose underwent, in his absence, a lobotomy, for which he never forgave himself. He used the proceeds of his plays to care for her.

Borny shows me sketches that clearly divide parts of the set among the characters. Downstage left, for instance, is the domain of Laura and her glass animals, while downstage right is Tom’s territory. Upstage is the family dining table and the more naturalistic world. 

A multimedia approach will support the idea of memories, with images projected on to the backdrop, perhaps evoking the feeling of a silent movie.

“There’s a sense in this play that the characters are all waiting for something to happen,” Borny says. 

“As the events run through Tom’s mind, he is, in a way, trying to make sense of a world where, when you take God out of the equation, you’re in an absurd world. Tom’s memory play is an attempt at giving meaning.”

The Gentleman Caller represents hope; he is the long-awaited one. But it is a false hope. Jim, after foolishly kissing Laura and getting her romantic hopes up, berates himself as a “stumble-john”, recognising what his ineptitude will do to her.

Audiences need not fear excessive doom and gloom, Borny says. There’s quite a bit of laughter, as when Tom tells Laura a story about a man nailed into a coffin and quips: “There is a trick that would come in handy for me – get me out of this two-by-four situation!”

The play opens with Tom introducing us, hanging his jacket up and going into the action. It ends with Tom quite literally controlling what happens as he instructs: “Blow out your candles, Laura. And so, goodbye”. She does, followed by an immediate black out.

“Williams knew how to structure a play,” Borny says.

The Glass Menagerie, Canberra Rep Theatre, July 23 (preview) to August 8.

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