Hello and welcome to this next episode of Chronicles, where today we're going to be talking

all about the glass menagerie by Tennessee Williams,

because I thought we could do with a change from Martians, Kings and Colonialism.

So this time we're just going to bring it down to ground level and talk about a play that really is just all about family,

not in like a sort of, you know, lame, fast and

furious sort of way, but genuine family, real family. Before we do get into this particular play

itself, though, I actually just want to spend just a few minutes talking about theatre generally,

because actually, aside from discussing

Shakespeare plays I've not actually so far talked about just theatre and so I don't

want this to bleed too heavily over but it's a good opportunity now given that

this is the first singular play that we're actually discussing here on Chronicles.

The misconception with theatre, which is entirely informed by just contemporary examples and, you know, the modern times that we live in,

where theatre and actors generally seem to consider themselves vanguards of progressivism, you know, at the

first frontiers of all social change and basically all of that change kind of sucks and is bad.

But fundamentally theatre has always had a political bent to it, even going back, you know,

the days of course of ancient Greece

with playwrights such as Aristophanes, who will get to in a few chronicles time.

But theatre makers, writers are really just always reacting to whatever the social circumstances,

what the, you know, the state of society at the time in which the playwright is

writing. And you have with this certain playwrights such as those from the Soviet Union, who were

of course writing under very, very sensorious conditions, but, you know, in their hearts, they were,

they were anti-communists. And so we'll get to playwrights like that further down the line.

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