The Glass Menagerie

I went into this expecting a classic drama, but what I got was something far more intimate and unsettling—audiobook as emotional vivisection. Anastasia Hille’s Amanda is electric; she doesn’t just perform the character’s delusions, she *lives* in them, her voice shifting from saccharine sweetness to sharp, cutting reprimands in a heartbeat. George MacKay’s Tom is the perfect counterbalance, his narration dripping with the kind of resigned bitterness that makes you ache for him even as you want to shake him. The real standout, though, is Patsy Ferran’s Laura. Her voice is so delicate it’s almost translucent, and when she describes her glass unicorn, you can hear the fragility in every syllable. The only misstep? The pacing drags in the second act, where the dialogue-between-monologues starts to feel like Williams indulging his own poetic tendencies at the expense of forward momentum. But the production redeems it with Sope Dirisu’s rich, grounding presence as Jim O’Connor, whose arrival in the narrative feels like a gust of fresh air—until the inevitable crash. The 103-minute runtime is just long enough to leave you breathless, like a play you’ve experienced live and can’t stop replaying in your head.