The Glass Menagerie, Tennessee Williams’s breakthrough work as a top-ranking playwright, is one of the great tear-jerkers of the American stage. A fearless portrait of the writer’s own home life in St Louis, the play offers heartbreaking studies of both his mother and sister: it is hard to know which is the sadder figure.

Which to make the more deserving of our sympathy is a question that has exercised directors since the first production in 1944.

Paul Milton at Cheltenham’s Everyman — where it is the theatre’s first home-grown main house production, pantomimes apart, for 15 years — chooses to stress the comic side to the absurd social pretensions of Tom’s mother, Amanda Wingfield (Julia Hills) and thereby makes his sister Laura (Emmy Sainsbury) the principal focus of our pity.

A faded Southern belle, Amanda twitters and nags to such an extent that one quite sees why her handsome husband — whose photograph portrait still dominates the family apartment — bolted 16 years before.

Crippled physically and, possibly as a consequence, emotionally, Laura is sentenced to a life that is over before it has properly started (the real life sister was a lobotomised schizophrenic institutionalised for more than half a century). The only hope, Amanda knows, is for her to find a husband but, equally, she understands — at bottom — that it will never happen. Nonetheless, the motions must be gone through, the niceties observed, the campaign to find Laura a ‘gentleman caller’ waged with vigour.

Success of a sort comes when Tom (Hasan Dixon) brings one of his colleagues from the shoe warehouse home to dinner. A former high school hero in all departments, Jim (Robert Fawsitt), for all his swaggering confidence, is now holding down a job scarcely more important than Tom’s. Former Oxford School of Drama student Mr Fawsitt performs excellently in the long and touching scene between Jim and Laura which ends with him shattering her fragile hopes just as surely as he does the horn on her glass unicorn.

In this production, unusually, we are not shown the collection of glass animals which, with a pile of gramophone records, is her principal amusement in an empty life. The glittering glass, however, is suggested beautifully by designers Phil R. Daniels and Charles Cusick Smith in the giant globes and pendants that appear from time to time, as if by magic, within the angled fire escapes and walkways that provide the framework for the Wingfields’ faded flat.

There are further performances of The Glass Menagerie until Saturday.Box office 01242 572573 (www.everymantheatre.org.uk)