Tinderbox theatre company is presenting The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams as part of the Belfast International Arts Festival. The production runs at the MAC from October 20 to October 27.

Artistic director Patrick J O'Reilly directs the play, which centres on Tom Wingfield, his mother Amanda, and his sister Laura. Tom seeks escape from his family through trips to the cinema, while his mother pushes him to find a suitor for Laura.

O'Reilly recently completed a two-week intensive training programme at the Jacques Lecoq International Theatre School in Avignon, France. He had previously trained there as a young artist.

"On the first day I stood up in the room and confessed, 'I've lost my fire,'" O'Reilly said. He described feeling tired of the demands of regular production schedules. The programme involved work on tragedy, comedy, melodrama, and clowning, and left him reinvigorated.

The director said the experience helped him confront his own motives and decisions. "Essentially, you confront yourself," he said. He returned to Belfast with a renewed focus on clear movement and physical theatre techniques.

For The Glass Menagerie, O'Reilly has assigned each character an elemental trait: Amanda is fire, Tom is wind, Laura is water, and Jim, a friend of Tom's, is earth. The production explores these qualities through movement and poetic metaphor.

The staging incorporates a cinematic theme, with lighting and staging by Paul Keogan evoking 1940s American films. A live pianist, Daniel Quigley, performs a score that mixes jazz and film music with motifs for the glass menagerie.

The play is semi-autobiographical, drawing on Williams's own family and his desire to leave his home. O'Reilly said he sees parallels with his own experience as a young queer man leaving a small town in County Louth.

The cast includes Thomas Galashan as Tom, Úna Kavanagh as Amanda, Louise Parker as Laura, and Jacob Baird as Jim. The Belfast International Arts Festival runs from October 14 to November 8.