Review: A Streetcar Named Desire

The cognitive dissonance between the person we perceive ourselves to be and the person others see is least for those who don’t give a shit. Blithely crashing through life, the Stanleys of this world lose not a wink of sleep on what others think of them. Whilst society can hardly be split into ‘Stanleys’ and ‘Blanches’, the latter group will move heaven and earth for others to see them in the right light, even if that means living in a perpetual twilight.

Watching A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams has the effect of staring into a moral mirror: each generation sees reflected back at them the faults their kin have visited on the world. Before this unflinching production by Pitlochry Festival Theatre, we blink first.

Evening in the blue-collar neighbourhood and the characters go about their usual rituals. Upstairs, Eunice (Deirdre Davis) runs around after her husband. Downstairs, Stanley and Stella, played by Matthew Trevannion and Nalini Chetty, head out for a night of liquor and poker. The subsequent hush which settles on the neighbourhood is disturbed by a new visitor: Blanche (Kirsty Stuart) who can barely believe the seeming depths to which her sister, Stella, has plumbed: a basement two-room apartment. Far from their salubrious upbringing in Belle Reve estate in Mississippi, she reaches for a drink to steady her nerves. Then another to keep the first company. Though sooner than expected, Stella is delighted to see Blanche when she and Stanley return home. Any xenia that Stanley may questionably have felt soon dries up as he goes through Blanche’s suitcase whilst she takes a bath. The furs and the jewellery immediately raises hackles and suspicions creating a heady stew of antipathy towards his sister-in-law. Emerging from the bathroom, smelling of exotic fragrances, Blanche is affronted at Stanley’s brutishness and when subsequently alone with Stella, questions her relationship with such a man. The revolving stage, upon which the action is set, inevitably unwinds a downward spiral of unrelenting inhumanity.

Director Elizabeth Newman's Streetcar plays with our perceptions. Is Blanche truly attracted to Stanley…or just a playing a game? What does it say about us as spectators even thinking the question? Should Blanche's agency be caged simply because it disturbs our perceived order of the world?  A legacy of moral ethics played down the decades, thoroughly uninterrogated, has crashed into these post-Me Too environs and stripped from us the sanctuary of our own cocoons. Blanche is presented as a victim (albeit a haughtily superior one) until we learn the circumstances of her life. Does extraneous information strip a victim of our sympathy? Would Blanche be more entitled to our sympathy were she 10 years younger? Williams’ clearly named the character to impart a sense of pureness… dubious though it may be (even before the reveal). It is an asymmetric Beauty And The Beast where the ‘Beast’ played by Stanley is not diametrically offset by Blanche’s wilting ‘Beauty’. It lays bare the values of the culture into which we were born, raised in, and from which we graduated. Few will come to Streetcar unaware of the story, but most of us will emerge unsettled at what we have just seen. Williams once said he did not believe in villains or heroes; by framing the 'purity of heart' with its own impurities, Newman has elevated Streetcar to a place of resonance in these turbulent times.

A Streetcar Named Desire played at Pitlochry Festival Theatre 2 June to 30 Sept