A Streetcar Named Desire

“Her delicate beauty”, said Tennessee Williams of Blanche DuBois, “must avoid a strong light. There is something about her uncertain manner, as well as her white clothes, that suggests a moth.”

Rachel Weisz captures that part of Blanche to perfection in the early scenes of Rob Ashford’s atmospheric production, where the sounds of New Orleans impinge at all times on the action and a ghostly choreography recreates both the sexual playing away of Blanche’s homosexual toy boy husband and Blanche’s brutal back entry rape by Stanley Kowalski.

Stanley, the Marlon Brando role, is the most difficult part, and never fully realized on the British stage. He’s a brutish offspring of Polish immigrants, not a time-warped reject from Chariots of Fire which is what Elliot Cowan seems to be playing in his chaotically accented performance.

The Polish, says Blanche, are something like the Irish only not so highbrow. But Ashford’s production makes more of the cinematic fluency of the action than it does of the musicality, and indeed humour, of the text. You don’t really feel the play bursting through the actors, more parceled out in small doses, like nips of Southern Comfort.

Blanche and her sister Stella, watchfully and touchingly played by Ruth Wilson, are both suitably young. Weisz is transparently shocked at the realization that Stella and Stanley are living in just two rooms, and the proximity between the tenement dwellers, erupting in shouting matches and thrown crockery, is well gauged on Christopher Oram’s set, with its tall spiral staircase and wrought iron decoration.

The haunting scene where Blanche takes brief comfort in the presence of a young man (Jack Ashton) collecting for charity is here an evocation of her own lost marriage. Weisz does that very well and is always best when she’s drifting away on her own fantasies. She’s less convincing when dealing with Barnaby Kay’s insistent Mitch, who might offer an alternative, or in conveying the tragic absurdity of her lost status as both schoolteacher and scion of a large plantation family.

Ashford creates some memorable ensemble moments in the community – aided by sharp-edged contributions from Daniela Nardini and Gary Milner as neighbours – and Oram’s design is beautifully lit by Neil Austin and underpinned with a low-level rumbling soundtrack of jazz and street sounds by Adam Cork. It’s a good production, not a great one.

- by Michael Coveney