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A streetcar named desire
Review

A streetcar named desire

September 6 2009

A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE Sydney Theatre Company and UBS Investment Bank production at the Sydney Theatre, 5 September-17 October; John F Kennedy Center Washington DC, 29 October-21 November; Brooklyn Academy of Music, NYC, 27 November-20 December, 2009. Images here by Lisa Tomasetti.

TOGETHER with “to be or not to be” and “a handbag?” Blanche DuBois’ knife-in-the-heart line – “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers” – is one of the great obstacle utterances in theatre. And it’s one which a simply sublime Cate Blanchett overcomes with piteous honesty and power. She makes it sound newly written and heard as if for the first time. Hers is a once in a generation talent and this performance is, I think, one of those “yes, I was there” occasions.

Ironically, the ripped raw vulnerability she brings to the role of Blanche makes one think that the kindness of strangers is something with which actors are very familiar; and its obverse. The strength and fragility of the acting life and the human beings who occupy it are dependent on that very kindness – from the strangers on the other side of the footlights. And rarely is that human strength and its accompanying fragility been more lucently portrayed than in Tennessee Williams’ great, 1948 Pulitzer Prize-winning play, A Streetcar Named Desire; in particular in the form of its tragic central character, Blanche DuBois.

Williams was 36 when he wrote Streetcar and it’s commonly believed that elements of Blanche are based on his sister Rose. She had suffered from schizophrenia and, in the way of those times, had been committed to a mental institution by their parents. There she was eventually lobotomized and spent most of her adult life. The horror of this act became one of the playwright’s recurring themes, along with that of a woman whose social airs and graces (his Southern belle mother) teeter on the edge of – and finally descend into – the abyss of full-blown delusion. (The Glass Menagerie and Suddenly, Last Summer also explore these traumatic aspects of Williams’ family.)

The play tends to be associated with the overblown, dark romanticism of the “Southern Gothic” genre, which possibly obscures Williams’ original intent. That intent is signaled in setting it, with heavy irony, in Elysian Fields Avenue. For anyone who has not seen it, the name suggests an idyllic thoroughfare, redolent of mint juleps on the porch and the scent of magnolias wafting on sultry evening breezes. Consequently, the decision by director Liv Ullman and her set designer, Ralph Myers, to create an oppressive, blank concrete, working class tenement where Stella and Stanley Kowalski occupy a cramped, ground floor apartment, is a shock for many in the audience.

For long we have been accustomed to picturesque evocations of the damaged butterfly, Blanche, amid once-genteel clapboard buildings, overhung by picturesque Spanish moss-draped oaks. Indeed, Blanche herself suffers the first of many shocks to her “nerves” when she discovers that baby sister Stella is living on a street that may have been named, with vaunting ambition, for Paris’s Champs Elysees, but is actually a multi-laned arterial highway with train tracks. The industrial wharves of Pontchartrain are its terminus: not a field, Elysian or otherwise, in sight. It’s a subtle and brilliant design choice.

The casting is similarly first-rate. Stanley is a role cursed by the filmic ghost of Marlon Brando, but Joel Edgerton has turned his back on that potentially overpowering image and refashioned the new American into a fine foil for the desperately teetering, would-be aristocratic Old South – represented by Blanche. (He’s of Polish descent, but definitely not a Polack, he chastises the careless Blanche.) His Stanley is sufficiently boyish – with a habitual giggle that belies the testosterone-scented buff bod – to make his hostility towards Blanche’s pretensions, as well as his unacknowledged attraction to her, more than credible.

Robin McLeavy as Stella walks a tricky line between Stanley and Blanche. She is the younger sister to the troubled and difficult elder sister – her past – and the adoring wife of the rough but vital husband, who is her future. McLeavy goes from nervous girlishness to a resigned yet still hopeful womanhood in the course of the play, in an emotional journey that becomes even clearer in retrospect. It’s a fine performance.

Similarly excellent in a crucial supporting role is Tim Richards as Mitch, one of Stanley’s poker-playing buddies who is a shy, socially inept mama’s boy and Blanche’s target as a likely meal ticket out of despair. His is a sweet, tentative and tender odyssey and Richards’ contribution to the climatic tragedy of the final scenes is just wonderful.

A streetcar named desire

The depth of this cast is evident in the other supporting roles, filled by actors of the caliber of Mandy McElhinney, Russell Kiefel, Elaine Hudson and Gertraud Ingeborg. However, it has to be said, that Cate Blanchett’s Blanche DuBois is in another league entirely.

Like Stanley and Brando, the character of Blanche has entered into visual popular memory in the form of Vivien Leigh, the English actress who also towered over Gone With The Wind as the fatally flawed Scarlett O’Hara. Part of the continuing fascination with Leigh’s portrayal of Blanche DuBois is that she suffered from bipolar disorder and said of the role that it “tipped her into madness”. Be that as it may, Leigh’s Blanche is from the outset a fluttering creature with a tenuous grip on reality. It is affecting, but possibly more so – now – because we know of her difficulties and fate. (Married and divorced from Laurence Olivier and a long-time sufferer of the tuberculosis that killed her at 53.)

Every actor who has subsequently taken on the role of Blanche has had to transcend all the above. Cate Blanchett more than transcends – she redefines the character and her journey. When Blanche first arrives at Elysian Fields Avenue, she is a fibber who embellishes and embroiders semi- and half-truths to improve upon reality. She knows exactly what she’s doing and is recognizable to most of us – who prefer, if we can, to tell a good story rather than the mere dull facts.

Her circumstances – the “loss” of the ancestral home of Belle Rive, the lingering deaths of family members, the slow decline of her life and reputation – and the realization that her baby sister has been less than honest about her own situation, all serve to propel Blanche inexorably to a point where her little fibs become bigger lies and these lies become central to her sense of herself. And, in the final scenes of her flight from brute reality, she is no longer able to distinguish fantasy from fact and her delusional state is complete.

Again, director Liv Ullman and a key creative collaborator, costume designer Tess Schofield, have added subtly yet immeasurably to Blanchett’s character arc through her apparel. When Blanche first arrives in the grubby tenement she is an absurd vision of the Old South in picture hat and elegant, out-moded two-piece suit. In her vast cabin trunk are furs, jewellery (“only rhinestones”) and other ladies’ essentials. By the time she leaves, she is so out of touch with reality that she is painfully unaware of how she is dressed and her final exit – depending on the kindness of strangers – is one of the most heartbreaking and memorable I have ever witnessed.

It seems unfair to nitpick after such a transcendent experience but I do hope they can all nail down their rather fugitive Southern accents during the run; particularly before they open in Washington DC, where the real thing is the real thing. On opening night there was a variety of approximately American accents to be heard and none stuck entirely for the duration. That aside, this Streetcar is splendid and although sold out before it opened, it would be worth queuing for returns or begging or hijacking a ticket to experience Our Cate at her brilliant best.

 

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