A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE To 3 October.
London.
A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE
by Tennessee Williams.
Donmar Warehouse 41 Earlham Street WC2H 9LX To 3 October 2009.
Mon-Sat 7.30pm Mat Thu & Sat 2.30pm.
Audio-described 29 Aug 2.30pm (+Touch Tour 1.30pm).
BSL Signed 24 Aug.
Captioned 7 Sept.
Runs 3hr One interval.
TICKETS: 0870 060 6624.
www.donmarwarehouse.com
Review: Carole Woddis 1 August.
Say not the struggle naught availeth – her determination makes this Blanche memorable.
Deeply personal, excessive in its indulgences, in A Streetcar Named Desire Williams so caught the clash between the old and new Americas as to engrain his distinctive, brutal and bewitching vision on our consciousness, probably forever. Magic indeed.
And it’s interesting Streetcar has followed Ibsen’s A Doll’s House into the Donmar. Like Ibsen, according to Christopher Bigsby in the programme, Ibsen believed in `life lies’. Williams’s Blanche DuBois is nothing if not a past-mistress of the invented life.
What is enthralling if not entirely moving about this Streetcar is Rachel Weisz’s determination not to portray Blanche as the normal picture of neurotic fragility but rather as a young woman blasted by death and loss in her short life, inventing her world as she goes along, as a lifeline to stop herself from mentally drowning. That she fails and finally sinks is perhaps the most poignant moment in Rob Ashford’s heated, sometimes over-wrought production. Hers is a brave defeat that goes down, all guns blazing, in a romantic haze of dying at sea.
Weisz’s radical interpretation is thus short on sentimental attachment. She won’t really let us go there. This Blanche is too feisty for that. What’s also missing is a sense of the inner legacy of that southern world to which Blanche so often refers. By contrast, we have Elliot Cowan’s Stanley Kowalski, the Polish descendant of immigrants but now the self-styled, proud, all-American boy.
He’s ludicrously overplayed – the Great Hulk by any other name – yet Ashford’s production still achieves an extraordinary physical beauty and immersive quality thanks to the gothic monumentalism of Christopher Oram’s New Orleans tenement design and Adam Cork’s watery, hallucinatory music.
Ashford also surrounds Weisz with some exquisitely telling real-life detail notably through Ruth Wilson’s Stella, Blanche’s sister, whose giggles and guilt-ridden tears when Blanche has been consigned to the asylum speak a lifetime of sibling love and concern. Barnaby Kay as Mitch, her suitor, and even Judy Hepburn’s spectral intervention as a flower-seller - “flores para los meurtos” - all contribute to what is a highly-defined, and some may consider almost definitive, revival.
Stanley Kowalski: Elliot Cowan.
Stella Kowalski: Ruth Wilson.
Harold `Mitch’ Mitchell: Barnaby Kay.
Eunice Hubbel: Daniela Nardini.
Blanche DuBois: Rachel Weisz.
Steve Hubbel: Gary Milner.
Pablo: Luke Rutherford.
A Young Man: Jack Ashton.
A Doctor: Charles Daish.
A Nurse: Judy Hepburn.
Director: Rob Ashford.
Designer: Christopher Oram.
Lighting: Neil Austin.
Sound/Composer: Adam Cork.
2009-08-05 00:26:10