Oddly for a nation that more or less invented doomed romanticism a couple of centuries ago, Germans don’t seem particularly susceptible to Tennessee Williams’ florid strain of it. Indeed, on the showing of Stephan Kimmig’s revival of The Glass Menagerie, they seem nowadays to be reluctant to expose themselves to it at all without a thick veneer of self-conscious irony. Put it this way: on opening night there were two spontaneous outbursts of applause and whooping, the first when Linn Reusse as perpetual wallflower Laura Wingfield prepared for her blind date by shimmying manically to Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love”, the second when Holger Stockhaus as her awkward suitor impersonated an entire jazz band. (Later, the two dance to Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s “Relax” with, literally, a big cock, for in this staging the Wingfields keep live poultry onstage.)

Kimmig stages the play in modern dress, which means the declined shabby-gentility of the Wingfields is replaced by a more or less white-trash aesthetic: the chairs are metal folding jobs, and the family seem more often to sit on the table, especially when mother Amanda (Anja Schneider, Mutter dressed as lamb) compulsively and embarrassingly flirts with Jim the “gentleman caller”, while Laura and brother Tom silently giggle behind them. Even though Laura still refers explicitly to her lame leg, her handicap (as regards her eligibility and self-confidence) in this version consists of a pair of bottle-bottom-thick spectacles.

Of the wistfulness and slight self-recrimination of brother Tom as narrator there is virtually no sign: even his opening monologue explaining to the audience the conventions of this memory play is shifted to half an hour in. The family say grace to a photo on the wall of their absent, Stetsonned Daddy; the sewing machine at which Laura compulsively works is one of several onstage, though the others are never touched. The spirit of Williams – how close events may be to falling out the right way whilst still remaining light years away in terms of probability or emotional fulfilment – is transmuted into an undistinguished dysfunctional-family piece with no perceptible intent on the part of either author or director.

Written for the Financial Times.