Ensemble Theatre is revisiting a play it presented here in 2013. That was a pretty solid show, as I recall it. But this Liesel Badorrek-directed production, with its sharper focus on design and lighting, and fine performances throughout, serves Tennessee Williams’s 1944 ‘memory play’ better.

Regarded as the most autobiographical of his early works, The Glass Menagerie has a narrator, Tom Wingfield (played here by Danny Ball), take us back to the St Louis of the 1930s, to the home he grew up in – and eventually escaped. What we are about to see, he tells us, is “truth in the pleasant guise of an illusion.”

Danny Ball in Ensemble Theatre’s The Glass Menagerie. Photo © Prudence Upton

Here we meet Tom’s mother, Amanda (Blazey Best), a narcissist whose husband left her alone with two children 16 years ago: Tom, currently a would-be poet working in a shoe store warehouse; and Laura (Bridie McKim), a recluse with a physical disability whose principal pastimes are a make-believe secretarial skills course and gazing at her collection of miniature glass figurines.

Amanda holds deep fears that Laura will become an “old maid”, dependent on the...