It has been only a few years since Rachel Weisz’s previous outing on the London stage, when she played a breathtakingly cruel young art student in Neil La Bute’s The Shape of Things. And now here she is playing an iconic 20th century role, Southern belle Blanche Dubois, who declares how she hates cruelty and is so old she cannot bare to reveal her age.
We knew Weisz was a good actor. Now we know she is very good. In Tennessee Williams’s sweaty, claustrophobic classic — which premiered in London in 1949 starring Vivien Leigh — Weisz takes on a role synonymous with pampered pretentiousness and finds within it the determined survivor that excuses all that infuriating deception. And it makes her eventual demise all the more heartrending.
Blanche is a serial denier of her age, social status, and her alcoholism. Arriving unannounced in one of her many demure lacy dresses that suggest purity of heart and innocence of body, she plants herself in her sister Stella’s down-at-heel apartment like a white orchid taking root in an allotment.
She is probably the greatest self-deceiver after Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard. Except while Norma pines for a glorious film-star past, Blanche is haunted by the life of manners and chivalry she was brought up to believe was rightfully hers. All these airs and graces are like a red rag to her bullish brother-in-law Stanley, played by Elliot Cowan. The contrast in attitude and culture is mirrored firstly in the actors’ bodies. Weisz is as pale and polite as porcelain, Cowan rude and rippling with muscles.
Rob Ashford’s atmospheric production also looks the part. Christopher Oram’s design suggests with a simple spiral staircase the two storeys of the tenement block in which Stanley and Stella live. And the faded elegance of New Orleans’s Elysian Fields is conveyed by wrought-iron balconies and gas lamps. It is a place where people work, live and love hard.
This rather too airy space could better have evoked the play’s sense of claustrophobia, but I wouldn’t put money on Ashford deciding to turn off the air conditioning to help recreate the stifling Louisiana heat. It would be tough on the actors, especially Weisz, who is on-stage for nearly the entire three hours.
But tougher still is that a three-act play has been turned into a two-acter. It has long been common for classics to be pared down and reduced to their shortest possible running time. But Jez Butterworth’s recent Royal Court drama Jerusalem proved that if the play warrants it, three acts can still work wonders, especially when broken by two intervals.
There are moments here when the story requires more time to settle than it is given — when fevered confrontations at night are followed by the morning calm. A pause might not only be needed by actors and audience, but by the narrative too. (On the other hand, producers know there is nothing like an over-long running time to shorten a play’s run).
If I have another gripe it is the scene in which Blanche submits to Stanley’s drunken advances while his wife, her sister, gives birth. It is not that Ashford’s version portrays the moment as an explicit rape that I object to, just that Cowan’s Stanley gives little or no clue of a hitherto suppressed urge.
But in every other respect Cowan delivers a powerful study of an alpha male capable of the brutish hard graft on which — not forgetting slavery — the South’s veneer of manners and chivalry was built. And by showing us the ghosts from Blanche’s past — the young man who shot himself after she discovered he was gay — Ashford makes more sense of her psychological fragility.
Weisz, meanwhile, builds an utterly convincing portrayal as a woman who yearns for magic and manners and who has not a malicious bone her body.
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