From the start A Streetcar Named Desire is a drama destined to end in tears and in this tremendously powerful, massively gripping Crucible production that final explosion of soul-destroyed tears is genuinely heart-rending. Not only is Joanna Vanderham phenomenal as Blanche and Amara Okereke as a beautifully real Stella but imaginative staging, lighting and superb music choices all work together like a dream in recreating the nightmare of this tale.
Born not in Tennessee but in Mississippi in 1911, Tennessee Williams (or Thomas) won his first Pulitzer Prize for A Streetcar Named Desire in 1948, a year after its first performance (and another for Cat On A Hot Tin Roof in 1955). Set in the heat of the sultry back-streets of 1940’s New Orleans, Streetcar’s intense story was further immortalised in the 1951 multi-award-winning movie with Marlon Brando and Vivienne Leigh while Blanche Dubois was famously also played, of course, by Marge Simpson in The Simpsons.
Written over seventy years ago about characters from a very specific time and place, Streetcar still closely engages to this day. As with enduring plays through the centuries, when it comes to human beings’ complex personalities, emotions and motivations and their equally complicated interactions and relationships, such stories have direct relevance in any era. So, it is with the story of this former teacher and plantation owner’s daughter, Blanche Dubois, who arrives at the New Orleans home of her estranged sister, Stella, and brother-in-law, Stanley, on a streetcar tram on the Desire Line (a real line at the time). As their combinations of personal flaws, fragilities, problems, pressures and impulses intensify, frictions and tensions in their dysfunctional relationships escalate, and intense, violent drama erupts, much based on Williams’ own experience.
While curtains hang in soft folds as backdrop, brilliant use is made of the Crucible’s unique stage and revolving sections. Atop a central, raised circle sits the shabby two-room apartment of Stella and Stanley, components dotted about on perpetual display – bath, basin with taps, low-slung bedding, tables and stools for poker and meals, and some slim, versatile doorframes, comprising a set-up that allows characters to sometimes remain onstage even when not involved in a scene. As the circle rotates occasionally to new places, fresh views are presented, while an outer, lower ring plays a revolutionary role, most notably in the shorter second act when the steamy, symbolic bath circles the periphery, a bath that’s a place of comfort and refuge for Blanche until it becomes one of direst horror.
A metal stairway leads to the balcony and to the unseen, upstairs apartment of Steve and Eunice. A piano on the balcony is played by a pianist who comes and goes and by Steve (Dominic Rye) and Eunice (Bridgette Amofah) together at one point. Its music starts before the play begins, subtly echoing the mood and atmosphere of the piece with sultry, laid-back music of the era that stops whenever actors take full focus as passions rise and rage. Occasional echoes from a distant sax similarly sustain mood and heighten themes of loneliness and desolation. Artistic beauty also comes in the lighting. Symbolically, Blanche hides from the ugly glare of bright light and she covers the ugliness of the naked, dangling light bulb with a pretty paper lantern, but from the beautiful orange lights that descend to hang over the stage, she’s delighted to pick out the Pleiades. Only towards the climax does the stage flood with harsh light as truth is laid bare.
Joanna Vanderham‘s Blanche is brilliantly real as she puts on the superior airs of bygone days and tries in vain to cover up her all-too-human fragilities, failures, insecurities and secrets with nervous prattle, flighty flirting, fibs, fantasies, tactless, imperious, paranoid forthrightness – and drink, deceiving even herself. Until she’s raped. This last-straw trauma leads to total mental breakdown as all these coping mechanisms desert her and she’s rendered limp, bewildered, frightened and empty. Never over the top, Vanderham‘s performance is stupendous, and the fine dresses and outfits she takes from the big trunk she brings with her are spot-on.
Without taking violence to graphic extremes, Jake Dunn is scary enough for most onlookers as the aggressive, hot-tempered, narrow-minded Stanley, yelling, fighting, hurling plates to the floor, slapping his wife and losing control at the drop of nothing at all, while the rape scene is played out symbolically as the telephone’s buzzing dial tone increases in volume. Stanley may think of himself as an alpha male king, but to Blanche he’s pure brute, unforgivably bestial and irredeemably common. Yet Amara Okereke’s Stella is filled with deep love for him as she is, too, for her sister, and she has great insight and understanding into why each behaves as they do, also recognising how highly vulnerable each is. Dunn brings out ex-soldier Stanley’s vulnerability admirably as he clings to the loving, forgiving wife he cherishes and depends upon yet treats so cruelly.
Unlike Stanley’s other fellow poker players, amiable Mitch (Tayla Kovacevic-Ebong) is gently courteous, thoughtful and achingly lonely as he falls for blond, lonely Blanche – until the truth comes out and he learns Blanche is telling a tissue of lies to cover up, amongst other things, her sordid past at the Flamingo Hotel. This he cannot forgive, and he forsakes her. Someone else lost to Blanche is Alan, the man she married at seventeen, and even though he’s no longer alive he, too, has a prominent onstage role. In Blanche’s mind the pair were ecstatically in love, and it was the happiest time of her life – until she was consumed by disgust to discover Alan was homosexual, after which he blew his brains out. Blanche’s fantasies conjure up Alan, alive and loving again, his imagined presence a source of infinite love, joy and comfort to her. Holding a red rose, Jack Ofrecio plays Alan tenderly and hauntingly, singing beautifully, too, as the pair touchingly interact.
Great clarity, dynamism and credibility of characters and story come from the splendid depth of acting as lust, desire, love, passion, cruelty, violence, truth and deception tumble around in the mix with odd moments of humour, all heading for the truly moving climax when Stella’s heart breaks to witness Blanche’s tragic end as her shell of her sister is led off by medics, quietly trusting she can depend on the kindness of strangers.
Eileen Caiger Gray
The show runs through most of March.
