At the very beginning of Tennessee Williams’ colossal masterpiece, as Blanche DuBois alights at her sister Stella’s ramshackle New Orleans apartment at the metaphorical end of her tether, we’re given a roadmap of her destruction: “They told me to take a streetcar named Desire, and then transfer to one called Cemeteries and ride six blocks and get off at Elysian Fields!”
We’re already in a world of symbolism, of auguries and archetypes; it’s a place where objects, names and places thrum with deeper meaning. Streetcar captivates us not because of its social realism – although it has its moments of that too – but because it tilts towards an exquisite fecundity on its way to ruin.
MTC artistic director Anne-Louise Sarks, directing a major revival of a classic text for the first time at the theatre, seems determined to wrest the work away from this poeticism to something almost ribald and broadly comic. In an attempt to freshen the material, she jettisons some key tonal indicators in Williams’ script but the result is strangely ham-fisted and counterintuitive, a dispiriting misfire.
Sarks has deliberately cast against type, perhaps as a way of dismantling preconceptions around the play. Sometimes this works fine – Steve Mouzakis’s Mitch is described as having “a very imposing physique”, which reads as faintly delusional – but mostly it simply doesn’t work at all.
In one of the most anticipated casting decisions of the year, Nikki Shiels takes on the role of Blanche, a part originated by Jessica Tandy and played memorably by Vivien Leigh, Cate Blanchett and Gillian Anderson. Shiels is majestic, authoritative and magnetic throughout; she’s also almost entirely wrong for the part. Blanche needs to be brittle, tremulous and in some key way imperilled if the tragedy is to land, but Shiels is too robust and commanding a presence. She has extraordinary vocal control, but she often uses it for comedic effect, which kills her vulnerability at every turn. She’s louche, dismissive and sardonic. She’s not Blanche, in other words.
Mark Leonard Winter is a fine actor, certainly capable of carving out a distinct reading of Stanley Kowalski that isn’t haunted by Marlon Brando’s towering performance. But he seems all wrong here too, nebbish and jocular where he needs to be brutal and intimidating. His voice sits in his upper register, reedy and needling, and he stalks the space rather than physically dominating it. Blanche immediately recognises Stanley as her “executioner”, but he plays it like her sparring partner or an irritating younger brother, entirely without menace.
Michelle Lim Davidson plays Stella – caught in a pincer move between two monstrous egos – without a hint of the sensuousness and stealth lying under the character’s surface. Davidson has a frothy charm and steel, but her southern accent is as wooden and unconvincing as her physicality is blockish. Any sisterly rapport with Blanche is totally absent.
Sarks directs with a sort of detached abandon, milking the crudest of laughs from scenes that require poise and suppleness. A moment of sexual predation from Blanche, for example, is treated like a pratfall. She has stripped the aesthetic entirely of William’s lushness and torpor – the intense heat, the cloying stickiness of the liquor, the sexual degradation all gone – and left something pale and denuded in its place. Moments of symbolism, like the appearance of the flower seller (Veronica Pena Negrette) or an inexplicable guitar player upstairs, are desultory because they are otherwise unsupported.
Mel Page’s set and costumes seem schematic, as if still part of the rehearsal process. The apartment block that revolves sporadically is under-dressed and utilitarian, the upper balcony largely wasted. Niklas Pajanti’s lighting – in a play so obsessed with lights and the quality of light – is unimaginative.
A Streetcar Named Desire is not an easy text to transpose or contemporise; not only does it trade in antebellum notions of gentility and gender, but it operates in a fulsome poetic register that sounds almost quaint or overripe to our ears. Sarks and her creative team have dismantled most of the key cultural markers in the play, hoping this will free it for modern audiences. But this only exposes the cast, who are left looking “hopelessly melodramatic” – something Sarks in her program notes explicitly states she was trying to avoid. Shiels is undeniably a great actor and Blanche is undeniably a great part – but it comes dangerously close to outright camp in this shaky, ill-conceived production.
A Streetcar Named Desire is on at MTC until 17 August
