Blanche DuBois, a former Southern belle from a wealthy family, moves into a shabby apartment with her sister Stella & brother-in-law Stanley after suffering a series of personal losses. Blanche brings with her a past that will threaten now only her future, that but of her sister's. As her brother-in-law edges closer to the truth, Blanche's fragile world begins to fracture, resulting in a violent conflict that changes their lives forever.
Rebecca Frecknall ['Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club'] directs this production, starring BAFTA-winning actor Paul Mescal and Anjana Vasan.
“I don’t want realism. I want magic!” declares Blanche DuBois. And I don’t want Normal People – I want Streetcar. Paul Mescal, who became a global obsession in the TV adaptation of Sally Rooney’s novel, is truly transformed in Rebecca Frecknall’s intense production of Tennessee Williams’s play. His Stanley Kowalski radiates with rage, wearing his psychopathy on his sleeve, with a menacing sexuality that could stop traffic – or make you run and hide. Connell’s silver chain lies in tatters. It’s entrancing to watch.
Frecknall places the action in the round, where actors watch from the sidelines or pace impatiently. Above the Almeida stage sits a drum kit; every so often, there’s a thunder crash that’s just a bit too loud. It’s a fitting touch for a Streetcar that wants to wake up its disconcerted characters, in which Blanche, Stella and Stanley seem helplessly trapped in a cycle of sex and violence. Here, snogging turns to sniping, groping turns to glowering. Stella gets punched by Stanley. Later she’s pinned down by his body in a moment of oppressive eroticism. She’s always at the mercy of his bodily urges.
It makes for a bracing start to the theatrical calendar, with the show’s press night delayed from December – Lydia Wilson had been due to play Blanche, but an injury forced her to withdraw. I was thrilled by her casting – her performance as the Duchess of Malfi in Frecknall’s 2019 production felt as natural as breathing. But Patsy Ferran, who won an Olivier for her role in Frecknall’s revelatory Summer and Smoke – another Williams revival – has taken up the Blanche mantle at the eleventh hour and it doesn’t show at all.
Her reading of the character is deeply intelligent and throws off all the usual breathy clichés. This is a woman who is worldly wise and rational. In one of the best scenes, in which Blanche pleads with Stella to realise how dangerous Stanley is, we also see an impassioned plea for a more enlightened world in general. Her loss of control is all the more pronounced when Stanley successfully sabotages her life. As Stella, Anjana Vasan – who also starred in Summer and Smoke – is smart too, living for the electricity between her and Stanley but increasingly wary of when the fuse might blow.
For a play that we usually think of as full of heightened emotion, Frecknall’s version feels deftly controlled and all the more effective for it. It takes a while to build in the first half but, once it does, it’s masterful. Small, innocuous actions from Blanche – such as turning the radio on – inspire 10-yard stares from Stanley that exude silent threat. Stanley’s assault on Blanche is performed impressionistically, with Blanche surrounded forebodingly by his mob of Hawaiian-shirted, poker-playing friends. And there are touches of almost balletic, melancholy movement in which we see Blanche haunted by her past, followed by the ghost of the husband who killed himself.
After her extraordinary Cabaret, this Streetcar is another signal that Frecknall is a director with thrilling insights into the works we think we know. But it also shows that she can draw out impressive performances from repeat collaborators such as Ferran and Vasan. After his cruel and brilliant Stanley, Mescal would be a very welcome addition to a brigade of actors realising the work of one of the most exciting directors around.
This wrenchingly sad, stark staging of Tennessee Williams’s play is the stuff theatrical myths are made of, and the first great London show of 2023. Starring Paul Mescal as the toxically masculine Stanley Kowalski, in his first stage role since Normal People propelled him to nice-guy TV stardom, it was delayed and recast when lead actress Lydia Wilson withdrew due to an injury.
The sublime Patsy Ferran stepped into the role of Blanche DuBois, the ageing southern belle whose gentility masks mental illness and sexual desperation, as if born to it. She, Mescal and Anjana Vasan as Stella, Blanche’s sister and Stanley’s wife, provide the core of emotional truth to Rebecca Frecknall’s production. All three act with their whole bodies.
The Kowalskis’ cramped New Orleans apartment is represented by a central dais, like a gladiatorial arena. The rest of the cast loom on the fringes, stonily observing, introducing props as if they were weapons. There is something ritualistic here about the way rancorous opposites Blanche and Stanley collide, with pregnant Stella caught in the middle.
For decades Streetcar lived under the long shadow of the 1951 Marlon Brando/Vivien Leigh film, but that influence has now faded. Even so, it has become almost traditional in the past 20 years for stage directors to be radical with this well-known work. Frecknall, fresh from her seismic reinvention of Kander and Ebb’s Cabaret, goes further than most.
Paul Mescal and Anjana Vasan in A Streetcar Named Desire
Marc Brenner
She strips away the Louisiana sweatiness of Williams’s play to make it harsher and colder. The costumes are bright approximations of postwar American fashion and the set amounts to two chairs and a suitcase. There are dance/mime intrusions from ghosts of the past.
A rock drummer in the gallery signals scene changes and emotional flashpoints with thumping crescendos, and designer Madeleine Girling introduces sudden downpours of rain onstage: both these things have become theatrical cliches recently but are undeniably effective here.
It could still seem tricksy if the central performances weren’t so riveting. Ferran picks her way subtly through every agonising downward step of Blanche’s self-deceiving, self-destructive path. Vasan imbues Stella with both sisterly heartache and forceful passion for her husband. It’s a delight to see the two actresses reunited, having co-starred in Frecknall’s revelatory production of Williams’s Summer and Smoke at this theatre back in 2018.
And Mescal? He’s horribly good: an insinuating, cat-like Kowalski with a wicked smirk and an incipient mullet, the violence in him barely battened down. The chemistry between the three leads is toxic but potent. A word, too, for Dwane Walcott, whose performance as Blanche’s suitor Mitch is beautifully understated and gentle.
Tennessee Williams doesn’t do happy endings but this production represents a triumph over disaster. Frecknall proves herself again to be a director of great vision and invention. And the performance that Ferran has pulled out of a hat, and the way she’s seamlessly integrated it with those of her impressive co-stars, is frankly astonishing.
Is Streetcar Named Desire a good play?
There's less room for reinterpretation in “Streetcar,” but by respecting and delivering the ideas of the play, not just its celebrated leading roles, Frecknall not only underlines it as a magnetic masterpiece, but she also proves once again that she is a theatrical force to be reckoned with.
Why was A Streetcar Named Desire play controversial?
Tennessee Williams's play A Streetcar Named Desire presents an ambiguous moral puzzle to readers. Critics and audiences alike harbor vastly torn opinions concerning Blanche's role in the play, which range from praising her as a fallen angel victimized by her surroundings to damning her as a deranged harlot.
What is the main message of the play A Streetcar Named Desire?
A Streetcar Named Desire presents a sharp critique of the way the institutions and attitudes of postwar America placed restrictions on women's lives. Williams uses Blanche's and Stella's dependence on men to expose and critique the treatment of women during the transition from the old to the new South.
Is streetcar a well made play?
A Streetcar Named Desire is one of the most critically acclaimed plays of the twentieth century and Williams's most popular work. It still ranks among his most performed plays, and has inspired many adaptations in other forms, notably a critically acclaimed film that was released in 1951.