To star in Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire is a dream for many actors – but the play comes at a price. “It tipped me into madness,” admitted Vivien Leigh. She had been doggedly determined to play the part of the self-deluding, fading Southern belle Blanche DuBois, but her own struggles with bipolar disorder were exacerbated when she took on the role in 1949, directed on stage by husband Laurence Olivier. Legend has it that she could even be found wandering London’s red-light district alone at night after shows, talking to prostitutes, finding an affinity between them and Blanche’s own “more pathetic promiscuity”.
Williams’s play – which is celebrating its 75th anniversary this month – follows Blanche’s unravelling. But it is not just her story: Streetcar contains a triangle of complex characters, whose failure to be honest with one another gives the play its tragic momentum. Having lost her family home, Blanche travels to New Orleans to stay with her sister, Stella, who lives in a shabby apartment with her brutish but charismatic husband Stanley Kowalski. While the snobbish Blanche weaves glamorous stories about her life, Stanley sees straight through her. Blanche and Stanley are both attracted to and repulsed by each other, and he becomes determined to break her, exposing her sexually promiscuous past – and leaving the pregnant Stella torn between her sister and her husband.
