A Streetcar Named Desire

August 3rd 2007 12:00 am | Theatre | Review - By Diana Simmonds

Streetcar remains a great play

A Streetcar Named Desire, Opera Australia at Sydney Opera House, August 2-29, 2007; seven performances only.

The much-anticipated Australian premiere of the Andre Previn/Philip Littell adaptation of Tennessee Williams' play Streetcar Named Desire is approximately the twelfth production staged around the world since its 1998 world premiere season in San Francisco. Given the cruel (if sometimes deserved) fate of many new operas - one season then off to the archives - this suggests that a considerable number of opera managements think enough of the piece to program it. Quite what that might be is worth exploration, because it really can't be about the music.

Streetcar lives indelibly in popular culture through the 1951 film version, directed by Elia Kazan and adapted for the screen by its author, starring Vivien Leigh as Blanche Dubois and Marlon Brando as Stanley Kowalski. In a sense the movie is a tyrannical omnipresence for any production since: Previn seems to acknowledge this by actually incorporating Brando's primal scream "Stellaaaaaaaaaa" into the score; and Teddy Tahu Rhodes delivers it without hesitation or a moment's self-consciousness. The point is, however, that because the movie exists in easily available form, it's like a Sutherland or Callas recording: those who follow are damned if they do and damned if they don't.

As a stage play Streetcar is also part of Western theatre culture. It has long had classic status as an exemplar of the steamy, magnolia-scented American Gothic genre which remains peculiarly fascinating to Southerners and non-Southerners alike. This applies particularly now that the underlying themes are no longer shrouded in euphemism to protect the apparently tender sensibilities of post-WW2 audiences. These controversial themes - glossed over when the play was first produced in 1947 and bowdlerised in the movie - include rape, domestic violence, homosexuality, insanity and aberrant sexual behaviour - including something then known as nymphomania. Nymphomania might now be better recognised as a woman displaying sexual appetites similar to those of most men. But back then - and until relatively recently - Blanche's pursuit of younger men was seen as morally repugnant and to be condemned.

From any angle, the themes and the story are dynamic. Blanche Dubois is a fragile, faded Southern belle whose delusions of grandeur run aground on the reality of her situation. The play and opera open as she arrives in New Orleans to take refuge with her sister Stella. She has lost her school teaching job and been run out of their small home town of Laurel, Mississippi for deviant behaviour (entertaining young solders from a nearby army base). More significantly, however, their ancestral ante bellum mansion Belle Reve has also been lost - to debt and mismanagement - and it is this, with all it means in terms of status and hope for the future, that threatens to loosen her precarious grip on sanity. That Stella has turned her back on Belle Reve and married a rough, working class son of Polish immigrants is incomprehensible to Blanche; at the same time her airs and graces are irritating and incomprehensible to Stanley. It is a compellingly poisonous brew.

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