Imogen Stubbs tells Laura Davis why performing in The Glass Menagerie is a new challenge
IMOGEN STUBBS is in a rush. One hand clamps her mobile phone to her ear as she dashes along the pavement to a costume fitting.
Horns beeping and the roar of traffic drown her words as she tells me about the previews for The Glass Menagerie, which is coming to the Liverpool Playhouse next month.
“It’s incredibly difficult because we’re finding in this theatre you have to project a lot and with the accents and everything like that it’s quite exhausting, but you just build up stamina I suppose,” she says, her clipped English accent sounding even breathier from the effort of talking and walking at the same time.
“My character goes through lots of different forms of mania and obsessiveness and desperation and she just talks an awful lot.
“And you can’t just vaguely do a Deep South accent, you’ve just got to go for it.”
Stubbs plays Southern Belle Amanda Wingfield, a single mother whose husband ran off 15 years ago and exists in their lives only as a portrait in the room.
Yearning for the rose-tinted comforts of her youth, she longs to find a suitor for her daughter, Laura, who has a crippled foot and spends most of her time with her collection of glass animals.
Amanda insists her son, Tom, should bring a friend home, as Laura’s first gentleman caller.
The familial element of the play drew Stubbs to the role, she says.
“It’s one of the first plays written in an expressionistic way about a dysfunctional family,” she explains.
“It’s a very, very different character for me to play, and I can’t deny that I don’t find that hard.
“But I’m nearly 50 now so I can’t go on playing ingenues and the interesting thing about this character is that, in the second half, she’s reenacting being young so it’s a bit like playing two different characters.”
With her seemingly ageless face, girlish fringe and bright eyes, Stubbs doesn’t look much older than when she played Ursula Brangwen in Ken Russell’s 1988 TV adaptation of DH Lawrence’s The Rainbow or Desdemona with the Royal Shakespeare Company.
Yet she is a 49-year-old mother-of-two children to her husband Sir Trevor Nunn, who she met on the set of Othello.
By this time she had already lost both her parents – her father, a naval officer, when she was 13 and her mother 12 years later.
She is not new to the work of Tennessee Williams, having played Stella in Jessica Lange’s London production of A Streetcar Named Desire in 1997.
