THE lilt of the voices and the sounds of the streets in 1930s St Louis makes Tennessee Williams’ play “The Glass Menagerie” unforgettable.

Then there are the archetypal characters – the domineering but insecure mother Amanda; frail daughter Laura; poetically-inclined, gay son Tom and the decent, homely gentleman caller – as real in 2016 as they were in 1944 when director Elia Kazan first staged it.

In early May the Helpmann award-winning version of the play that made Williams famous will play in Canberra.

It’s staged by Belvoir Theatre’s artistic director Eamon Flack in his first full season at the company’s helm. But it’s not his first time with the play.

“I love ‘The Glass Menagerie’ – it’s one of the great plays of all time,” Flack tells me by phone from Sydney.

“And it’s not just the smell, the sound, the characters, it’s a huge vision played out on stage.

“It’s a perennial, it’s done all the time by both professionals and amateurs, it’s a much clearer play than all of the other works put together.”

The narrator, Tom Wingfield, tells us that it’s a “memory play” but Flack prefers to see it as “a sort of battleground of visions – each character is steeped in a vision of their life and the need to be free”.

“Tom is artistic, but caught in a capitalistic society where his sexual orientation is anything but normative,” Flack says.

“Laura is a fragile, gentle soul in a brutal society and Amanda is losing her vision and self-respect – the ideas feel so contemporary.”

In approaching Williams’ first famous play and his most autobiographical – almost certainly Tom represents the young Thomas Lanier Williams before he adopted the name “Tennessee” – Flack had in mind the need for a strong visual element, to show the lives of little people.

In Kazan’s original production image projections were used but nowadays no one does it. Flack does though. Noting the playwright’s years as a screenwriter with MGM, he and designer Michael Hankin emphasised the visuals, using video and screens to turn the script into “the play as a soundtrack”.

They started out with three or four designs, but eventually they decided they wanted to put the entire house on the stage, “like “eavesdropping on the life of a family,” he says, even down to the detail of Tom and Laura sharing a foldout bed.

“The house is like a film set; with an obscene amount of props it’s naturalistic,” he says.

“We wanted to show that this family was on the edge of poverty, that capitalism for people like this is a brutalising system.”

As for those characters, Amanda is the “hugest presence” inside the play and Pamela Rabe, he says, is a tall woman whose height coincidentally accentuates the battle between mother and son.

Tom nurses the darkest secret. Williams would never have been game to put the label “gay” on him, but when Luke Mullins turned up to rehearse the part, he insisted it be clear in this production that he was indeed gay.

Flack believes that Williams, an outsider, engages in a subtle feminist critique. So Laura, usually pictured as a fragile little thing like the glass unicorn in her menagerie in the hands of Rose Riley, becomes a “ferocious fighter”.

All this makes the play sound simple, and yet, Flack says, “it’s also a play with a lot of secrets in it… we kept being caught out by Williams’ slyness”.

“The Glass Menagerie”, The Playhouse, May 3-7, bookings to canberratheatrecentre.com.au or 6275 2700.