The Jewish Chronicle
Review: A Streetcar Named Desire
Fine Streetcar worth the long, tiring ride
September 28, 2010 10:16
Fine Streetcar worth the long, tiring ride
September 28, 2010 10:16A Streetcar Named Desire is no easy ride. It is a dark and disturbing play in which the desire referred to in the title is largely sexual and largely unfulfilled.
There really is a streetcar called Desire, which runs along the tramlines of New Orleans, where the play is set. Its destination is a road symbolically called Elysian Fields ,where the action unfolds. (Elysian Fields is also the final resting place of heroic souls in Greek mythology.)
The title is therefore laden with meaning and the play itself is a heavyweight, primarily about sisterly strife, but with the tangle of threads and themes to rival a Shakespearean tragedy.
Tennessee Williams - one of America's most celebrated playwrights - won adulation and prizes (including a Pulitzer for Streetcar), but also faced battles with drink, drugs, and depression, as well as having to deal with a sister severely damaged by a frontal lobotomy and a friend who committed suicide. That he spent a spell in a psychiatric hospital is not surprising. Some of his demons are laid bare in Streetcar.
Director David Thacker (see interview on page 31) skilfully unfolds the layers, bringing the audience right inside the grimy menage of Stella Kowalski, her husband, Stanley and her sister, Blanche DuBois.
The play opens with the arrival of Blanche - the Southern belle played famously in the 1951 film by Vivien Leigh opposite Marlon Brando. Her trunk is stuffed with furs and pearls, and she is clearly alarmed at her sister's reduced circumstances, and marriage to a Polish man she describes as bestial and subhuman.
Yet her tragic circumstances and her own insatiable appetite for men have left her penniless and ruined any reputation she once had. School teachers in the 1940s were not supposed to seduce their pupils. And so she moves in as the unwelcome guest.
Clare Foster plays an enigmatic Blanche, part monster, part victim, grasping at a last chance of love - or maybe just desire. Stella is played by local Bolton actress Amy Nutall, and the tension between the two of them makes the production. Kieran Hill is a powerful presence as Stanley, the "grunting ape" who resents Blanche's arrival in his home, and whose brutality brings about the play's devastating climax.
This version does Williams more than justice, but it is hard, demanding work. And, I must admit, three and a bit hours of it left me flagging. (Until October 9. Tel: 01204 520 661)