THERE are many candidates for the title of “greatest American playwright”, from Lorraine Hansberry to Tony Kushner, Arthur Miller to August Wilson. Tennessee Williams would have to be a prominent name on any shortlist.
A son of the American South, his plays delve with depth and resonating subtlety into the anguished racial history, the distorted gender relations and the profound psychological and sexual repression of the society in which he was raised. Of all Williams’s great dramas, the most iconic is, surely, A Streetcar Named Desire.
The story of “fallen” southern “belle” Blanche DuBois and her arrival in the ironically misnamed working-class district of Elysian Fields, New Orleans – where her younger sister Stella lives with her Polish-American, alpha male husband Stanley Kowalski – the play premiered on Broadway in 1947. However, it was Elia Kazan’s famous 1951 movie, starring Marlon Brando as Stanley and Vivien Leigh as Blanche, that secured the play’s legendary status.
Kazan’s ratting on fellow left-wingers to Senator Joseph McCarthy’s infamous House Un-American Activities Committee in 1952 notwithstanding, the film is a cinematic masterpiece and a fitting tribute to Williams’s writing. As, in many ways, is Elizabeth Newman’s new production of the play for Pitlochry Festival Theatre (PFT).
Played on designer Emily James’s cleverly designed, mechanically rotating set, with evocative lighting by Jeanine Byrne and atmospheric music and sound by Pippa Murphy, the piece reeks of the steamy, jazzy streets of the Louisiana city known as The Big Easy. Drawing upon PFT’s summer season ensemble, the show boasts some fine performances.
Nalini Chetty plays Stella with delightful nuance, portraying a woman who is caught painfully between her loyalty to her sister and her adoration of her husband. Keith Macpherson is equally impressive as Harold Mitchell, the most decent of Stanley’s card table buddies, whose relations with Blanche go brutally awry.
No production of Streetcar can succeed without a strong Blanche, and Newman certainly has one in, surely one of Scotland’s finest actors, Kirsty Stuart. From the moment she arrives on stage, Stuart’s Blanche manages, as she should, to attract and repel in equal measure.
Simultaneously glamorous yet snobbish, abrasive yet vulnerable, the actor constructs an unerring portrait of her character’s complexities and contradictions. A lesser actor would make a monster of Blanche, a southern woman from a ruined, former landowning (and, one assumes, slave-owning) family who finds herself, as she euphe-mistically has it, “relying on the kindness of strangers”.
In Stuart’s hands, however, the role is played in all of its colours, making Blanche the tortured and, in the drama’s devastating conclusion, sympathetic character that Williams intended.
If only Matthew Trevannion’s playing of Stanley was equally refined. The character may be, in numerous aspects, a symbol of what we now call “toxic masculinity”, but the actor’s interpretation is too blatant by half.
In Trevannion’s performance, the role played with such depth on screen by Brando becomes little more than a raging, roaring bull in a man’s skin. The irony of this is that, ultimately, such a rendering of Stanley makes the character’s appalling recourse to physical and social brutality less, not more, powerful.
If the characterisation of Stanley unbalances Newman’s production, the pronunciation of the DuBois family’s former colonial pile Belle Reve (which, here, is spoken “Bell Rev”, rather than the established “Bell Reev”) is positively odd, albeit that it may be technically good French.
These large and small shortcomings notwithstanding, this is, in many departments, a fine production of Streetcar.
Various dates until September 30: pitlochryfestivaltheatre.com
