OBSERVER: A Streetcar Named Desire
Winner of the 1947 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire is an American classic.
In director Benedict Andrews’s production filmed for National Theatre Live, the updated setting is no longer post-World War II New Orleans but the present day.
Fading southern belle, Blanche DuBois, visits her sister Stella in the French Quarter.
From the moment Blanche arrives in the ironically-named Elysian Fields, the play presents the struggle between Blanche’s delusions of grandeur and Stella’s ex-Army husband Stanley’s unadulterated, raw power.
Blanche engages in a fruitless struggle for her sister’s affections with the broodingly menacing Stanley, weaving fairytales of her circumstances.
Ben Foster’s unforgiving, hulking, alpha male Stanley suspects his sister-in-law of cheating when she reveals a lost inheritance, the family home claimed by creditors.
Confrontation is inevitable when Stanley overhears Blanche describe him as an “ape”.
Blanche’s fragile world begins to crumble in the clash between illusion and reality.
With nowhere to go and all her bridges burned, Blanche descends into madness.
Vanessa Kirby is torn as the pregnant Stella, whose first loyalty is to Stanley, but who ends up a reluctant referee mediating between her husband and sister as they fight it out.
Foster’s Stanley simmers with resentment, violence always just under the surface.
But it is the excellent Gillian Anderson who steals the show as the disintegrating Blanche, clinging to her fancies and chimeras.
That said, the current update contains strange and disturbing elements.
The explosive domestic violence is hard to watch, particularly its acceptance by Stella and their friends.
That Blanche is the only one to comment on Stanley’s violence seems to place it in its original 1940s setting.
In the present, Stanley’s violent outbursts terrorise the action.
Now showing in select Australian cinemas.
Review by Kathryn Keeble