On The Glass Menagerie As A Queer And Autobiographical Text

"I really love Tennessee Williams as a writer and I'm really interested in queer texts," begins actor Luke Mullins, speaking to what motivated him to first take on the role of Tom in Belvoir's 2014 production of The Glass Menagerie. "His whole body of work is obviously, they're all queer texts... I had seen a lot of productions of his plays that really didn't address that, that didn't acknowledge that at the centre of all his plays is a queer aesthetic and a queer vision for the world, and so, when I was first talking to Eamon [Flack] about this production, we talked about that a lot, and wanting to really bring that out."

This month, the Helpmann Award-winning production, starring Mullins, Pamela Rabe, Rose Riley and Harry Greenwood, and directed by Belvoir Artistic Director Eamon Flack, makes its way to Melbourne's Malthouse Theatre.

"Stepping back into an actual rehearsal room with the director gives you time to actually undo a few things and re-weave them."

"[Remounting the production]'s been quite lovely actually. It's all come back quite quickly, and we loved the production so much, and I really loved making it originally, and it's a really very nice cast and everything, so it's been delightful going back to it."

Returning to a production has its potential pitfalls. "It's always tricky returning to something that you ensure that you reapproach it from the same place you did the first time," says Mullins. "Because it's now two years ago, it's in your memory and you have a general feeling of what it was, if you're not careful you can end up playing the effect of what you were doing rather than what you were actually doing. We've talked about that a bit and we've been careful to go back to, 'What was the actual originating impulse behind this, what was the thought behind this' and refinding that."

But the remount also offers its own opportunities. "Changing stuff - things that we want to find new ways to do, or things we were never quite satisfied with that you have a chance to reinvestigate, that you can do a little bit throughout a performance season, but stepping back into an actual rehearsal room with the director gives you time to actually undo a few things and re-weave them."

There were other questions to be asked when reapproaching Williams' 1944 text, Mullins and co teasing out the tension between fiction and autobiography inherent in the play. The character of the narrator, Tom, is considered a stand-in for Tennessee (he was born Thomas Williams in 1911). "He puts himself in it as a character, his mother and his sister are clearly not just based on but really drawn from life in Amanda and Laura, and that was important to our understanding of the play because once you know about his whole life, a lot of things in the play come into sharper focus. Especially things he couldn't write explicitly about at the time, in the 1940s when he first wrote the play, things had to be more sublimated, they start to come to the surface when you read it against his own life... It's taking that information and going 'Ok, how does that throw a new light on what's happening for the characters in the play and what can we bring out in terms of their backstory, etcetera,' because in the end you can only play what's on the page."