PLAYWRIGHT Tennessee Williams once said he had no interest in writing about surface issues, about the fripperies of life people chat about politely.

His intention was to examine those things we live and die for, to document our emotional lives and speak to his audiences as if he’d lived every minute of their darkest hours.

‘The Glass Menagerie’ was written in the early 1940s and was to be the play that propelled the previously unknown playwright to stardom.

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It is widely regarded as the most autobiographical of his works, closely mirroring his own unhappy family background.

This latest production, a Headlong and West Yorkshire Playhouse collaboration, arrives at Liverpool Playhouse this week with a cast that includes Emmy Award-winning actress Greta Scacchi.

Minimalist and stark, the staging of the show reflects the bleakness of his character's existence as they struggle with the spectre of their pasts and a shared sense of hopelessness about their futures.

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Scacchi plays Amanda Wingfield, a faded Southern Belle who lives on the golden memories of her youth as a feted debutante who once received 17 gentleman callers in a day.

She lives in a shabbby, small St Louis apartment with her two children; Tom, who works in a shoe warehouse to support the family after his father abandoned them 16 years earlier and Rose, who struggles with a limp and crippling shyness and spends her days in isolation, polishing and caring for a collection of miniature glass animals.

Tom, an aspiring poet, makes nightly visits to the cinema to escape the monotony of his day-to-day life and is tasked by his histrionic mother to find a suitor at the warehouse for his sister.

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When he brings home work colleague Jim, a colleague and former high school acquaintance, the delirious expectancy of Amanda collides headlong with the impossible reality of their circumstances leaving the characters lost, bewildered and even lonlier than before.

Scacchi is sensational as the wild-eyed, tragicomic Amanda, who rhapsodises over the glory days of her youth one moment and cruelly reprimands her children the next.

Erin Doherty, as the painfully constrained Laura, is as delicate and fragile as the glass animals she tends to and Eric Kofi Abrefa as her would-be suitor is both charming and charismatic.

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A second-act duologue is so poignantly played by the two actors it makes you wish Williams could have surrendered to sentimentality and given them  both the happy ending they deserve.

But this is a tale of hopelessness and confinement and designer Fly Davis’s tight, stark set perfectly reflects the claustrophobia of the character’s lives.

Williams had no desire to sugar-coat reality and this pared back, powerful version of 'The Glass Menagerie' suits his intentions perfectly.

Painful and resonant, like a long-treasured memory it will linger long after you leave the theatre.

The Glass Menagerie is at at Liverpool Playhouse until Saturday October 31.

For more information or to book tickets visit www.everymanplayhouse.com

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