Streetcar Named Desire
Liverpool Playhouse
Feb 17 – Mar 10
9/10
We’re down in the steamy French Quarter of New Orleans with young Stella and her primal and rough Polish husband Stanley Kowalski. This is the area of gamblers, streetwalkers and jazz musicians.
The set, on a revolving platform, consists of a two-room apartment with just a thin revealing curtain between the bedroom and the living room. The room is built at a crazy angle with a bent revolving fan hanging from the ceiling, emphasising the conflict that is to unfold. The back of the set features a spiral staircase to the upstairs apartments where live other warring couples struggling to make a life in the quarter.
Into the loving yet male-dominated Kowalski marriage comes Blanche, Stella’s older sister, who more than upsets the equilibrium the couple have arrived at.
Blanche, arrives from the family plantation, bringing her airs and graces, and finery, to this masculine household, shocked that her little sister should be living in such impoverished circumstances.
Her snobbery and criticism of Stanley’s dominance and the state of this young couple’s home soon brings her on a collision course with the man of the house – causing sexual tension in the heat of this southern town. It’s ironic that she has arrived on a streetcar whose route is named Desire to their home in Elysian Fields Avenue.
Blanche DuBois is not all she makes out. Her pretensions to virtue and culture only thinly mask alcoholism and delusions of grandeur. We learn that she once had a brief marriage marred by the discovery that her husband was having a homosexual affair and his subsequent suicide has led Blanche to withdraw into a world in which fantasies and illusions blend seamlessly with reality.
She leads the couple to believe she is on a summer break from her teaching job, yet Stanley discovers she has been sacked for a dalliance with a 17-year-old pupil. Stanley also discovers she has also been living in a run-down hotel receiving gentleman callers, and is eventually forced to leave.
Her last resort is to visit her sister, yet she is in denial of her decline, believing herself still to be beautiful and desirable.
Amanda Drew gives a magnificent rendering of the nervy, pretentious Blanche, with her soft southern accent, trying with winsome ways to persuade her sister that she can do better, though Stella loves her man – with all his faults.
The comparison in looks with Vivien Leigh, who starred in the 1949 London production, does not go unnoticed. Drew shines as the fading beautiful southern belle in all her confidence, trying to laud it over her sister yet in her lone moments we witness her readily reaching for the liquor bottle to steady her nerves. We see her eventually crumble in a totally believable performance.
Sam Troughton gives a sterling performance as the macho Stanley, and when he takes his shirt off at the end of a day’s work, showing off his muscly hairy chest you can feel the sexual tension rising, not just on set, but in the audience too.
He swaggers about the stage like he owns the whole world. He is confident in his role and his anger is magnificent. However, he has a softer side when it comes to his wife and this is beautifully portrayed. This brutish man is true to what he is and Troughton demonstrates this admirably.
The pregnant Stella (Leanne Best) yields to her husband but also tries to show her sister she can be stronger, though this results in stirring Stanley to smash up the joint. Best is deferential and endearing in her role, showing her vulnerable side, yet deep love for her man.
The noisy drunken card games played by Stanley’s bowling club mates add to the working class ethos of the situation, giving balance to the tension between the three main protagonists. One of these, is Mitch (Matthew Flynn), a possible suitor for Blanche, who is a decent, if not terribly bright, who at first is taken in by her coyness and beauty.
But when he hears of her lies backs off. Blanche who at this stage would take anybody who shows just the faintest interest in her is totally bemused by his change of heart. Flynn plays the part with compassion giving us just the right amount of feeling and awkwardness.
The mood of the play is aided by bluesy music and clever sultry lighting, but one never really gets the feeling of the heat that is mentioned in the dialogue. The rape scene where Stanley takes Blanche is terribly coy and one feels it could have been more robust.
But having said that it is a great production evidenced by the rapturous applause and three curtain calls last night.
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