An expert on the work of Tennessee Williams, Dr Geoffrey Borny, returns to Canberra Rep this month to direct the ACT’s first production in a decade of The Glass Menagerie, Williams’s breakthrough work, using the rarely performed reading edition.

Menagerie is a memory play, “almost a guilt play”, Borny explains. Tom (Rob de Fries) recalls the family he abandoned in a cramped apartment in a St Louis slum during the Depression. His mother Amanda (Victoria Tyrrell Dixon) dreams of finding a husband for his reclusive sister Laura (Jamie Johnston), who is far more at ease with her collection of glass animals than with people. The gentleman caller Tom brings home, however, is Jim (John Whinfield), the man Laura had a secret crush on at school…

Menagerie ran on Broadway for 561 performances, and won the New York Drama Critics’ Circle award for Best American Play (1945).

“For me, this and A Streetcar Named Desire are two of the most extraordinarily wonderful plays, major works of the twentieth century,” Borny says.

But also among the most misunderstood.

Borny has spent much of his career studying Williams; he wrote his PhD thesis on the playwright in the 1970s. In it, he argued that Williams has been undervalued or misinterpreted as a realistic playwright telling small stories of ordinary lives. Borny instead saw Williams’s vision as absurdist: reality is meaningless (life is based on illusions), but humanity responds romantically (illusions are necessary for life).

“The human condition is a tragedy for Williams,” Borny says. “While often using quite normal, realistic dialogue, many of his plays – in particular Glass Menagerie and Streetcar – are closer to absurdist writers like Samuel Beckett. There is a horror in things, a horror at the heart of the meaninglessness of existence. … Therefore, what we’ve got to do is try to make some meaning out of it. We construct what Blanche Dubois [in Streetcar] would call ‘a beautiful dream’.”

Borny describes Menagerie as a moving tribute to the fragile illusions we create just to give meaning to our lives. Williams said his major concern in writing this play was to “present a defence of the romantic attitude toward life, a violent protest against the things that destroy it”, Borny notes.

“The major thing that destroys the romantic attitude toward life is realism with its demand for the rejection of beliefs that do not accord with it, by labelling such beliefs as ‘illusory’.”

Thus, Amanda lives in her dream world of a romanticised South, “clinging frantically to another time and place”; Tom dreams of adventure and excitement; Laura is “like a piece of her own glass collection, too exquisitely fragile to move from the shelf”; and even the supposedly realistic Jim, “a nice, ordinary young man”, “the most realistic character in the play”, believes in the American Dream of self-improvement, money, and power.

“All of the characters in the play live in private illusionary worlds because Williams is making a universal statement about the human condition,” Borny writes. “For Williams, living in illusionary worlds is the norm, not an aberration from the norm… Such illusionary worlds are necessary to keep the absurd circumstances of life at bay.”

But conflict occurs when those private worlds collide. “If people are in sets of illusions that are similar, they get on together,” Borny says. “If they have sets of illusions that are a clash, there are smashes. … And so the ultimate virtue in the world is to allow someone to keep their illusions.”

The reading edition being staged at Rep – published in collections of Williams’s work and “the version he preferred to hand down to posterity” – is the definitive text of The Glass Menagerie, Borny argues, because it “squares far more closely with Williams’s stated theory of drama than does the acting version”. His article on the topic was anthologised by the great American critic Harold Bloom.

“Williams’s concern to master the ‘necessary trick of rising above the singular to the plural concern, from personal to general import’ led him to reject Realism as being trivial,” Borny writes.

In the production notes, Williams declared that “a new plastic theatre … must take the place of the exhausted theatre of realistic conventions if the theatre is to resume vitality as a part of our culture”.

“The straight realistic play with its genuine frigidaire and authentic ice-cubes, its characters that speak exactly as its audience speaks, corresponds to the academic landscape and has the same virtue of a photographic likeness,” he wrote. “Everyone should know nowadays the unimportance of the photographic in art: that truth, life, or reality is an organic thing which the poetic imagination can represent or suggest, in essence, only through transformation, through changing into other forms than those which were merely present in appearance.”

To that end, Williams originally called for an expressionist screen projecting magic-lantern slides with images or titles; music to “express the surface vivacity of life with the underlying strain of immutable and inexpressible sorrow”; and non-naturalistic lighting, a chiaroscuro effect like El Greco.

As a memory play, therefore, Menagerie is “dimly lighted, sentimental, not realistic”, as Tom tells the audience at the start. But the commonly staged acting edition, based on the original production, makes the play more naturalistic, Borny believes. It removes the screen; softens expressionistic lighting and removes artificial transitions; and makes more than 1,000 changes to dialogue, reshaping characters.

“While the acting version is a superbly drawn portrait of individuals, the reading version is both a portrait of individuals and, symbolically, an image of the human condition,” Borny writes.

“The Glass Menagerie is not simply about the sad lives of the Wingfield family. It is that, to be sure; but it is so much more – it is about life itself.”

The Glass Menagerie, by Tennessee Williams, directed by Geoffrey Borny, 24 July to 8 August. Tickets: https://canberrarep.org.au/content/glass-menagerie.