Tenessee Williams

I've just, this afternoon, seen Theatre Clwyd's production of Tenessee Williams's play "The Glass Menagerie"; quite a good production done in a style which, I read, is very like the style in which it was originally performed.
There is one unsettling thing, to me, about the central character, Amelia, the mother of Tom and Laura, both no longer in their teens (though their mother treats them as if they still are) and that is that she is such a bore. Bores are difficult enough to portray in novels (I think immediately of the one in "Emma" which almost wrecked the book for me) but should prove almost impossible to present in plays. This one is so grindingly borish that I wondered if the part had ever been successfully played. Well it seems that it has - many times! Must be me then. Though I insist that this middle-aged woman from the deep south of America is a person whom, if you met her in real life, you'd flee from as fast as you would from someone with swine flu. She is obsessed. She is full of romantic yearning for the life that once was when she was young and had "gentlemen callers" by the dozen mooning over her. She is tactless. She is ruthless, unsympathetic, manipulating and deceitful. She is, in short, a monster. Yet great actresses have played her and succeeded in making her palatable. More than that - they've made her acceptable as a human being..... but surely not loveable!
The play itself is a bit of a mess with its "voice over" of the son telling us what's coming next (really, though, what has been) and the opening act's relentless battles between mother and son, with the same things being said over and over.
But the second act lifts the play into a world of manners and decency that gives the play a rich centre that is near to being moving.
I was surprised to see that Gertrude Lawrence played the mother in an early film and that Kirk Douglas played the gentleman caller (though I think he must have done this rather well - just up his street).