It’s pretty effective, offering a palpable image of what Tom has become: a rakish, worse-for-wear chap with a lifetime of regret for abandoning his family etched into his features though he never relinquishes the writer’s eloquent turn of phrase, is that alcohol wetting the edges of his delivery? This Tom skulks around the edges of his own story, observing, even spying on the action rather than simply relating it, sometimes even offering props to the other characters - the telephone, a mirror. Paul Hilton ( The Inheritance) is the older, unreliable narrator, Tom Glynn-Carney ( The Ferryman) the young firebrand. Director Herrin, who staged a fine production of All My Sons at the Old Vic in 2019 featuring a fabulously volatile performance from another Hollywood royal, Sally Field, tackles this element with a seemingly obvious but seldom used device: having two actors play Tom. The depth of the play comes less from the scenario than the telling of it, through the memory, or invention - “truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion” - of the older Tom. This is the setting for a domestic drama that focuses on former Southern belle Amanda’s determination to see her reclusive, painfully shy daughter Laura (Lizzie Annis) married and with some kind of future secured, while her son Tom works in a warehouse and dreams of being a writer, simmering angrily with an eye on escape. Louis apartment, almost no set at all, captures the penury: a bare table centre stage, clutter around the far edges (a few chairs, a record player, an old piano), the only color in the form of a glass display case containing the shiny animals that represent the hobby and single source of pleasure for a lonely young woman. With the world currently teetering on the edge of recession, there’s more than the usual worrisome ring to Williams’ Depression-era tale of a fatherless family barely scraping through, and a son torturing himself with work he loathes as the sole breadwinner. Tyne Daly, Liev Schreiber to Star in 'Doubt' on Broadway
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