A Street Car Named Desire @ Noel Coward Theatre, London
Better than a Golden ticket in a chocolate bar, the joyous feeling of having secured a literal hot ticket for Tennessee Williams’ play, without having to remortgage or sell a kidney! Or pay ridiculously high prices. Plus in this play, charming Paul Mescal is ‘evil’ and downright vile at times. (Thankfully though it’s only acting). Smugness of the bargain theatre ticket hunter aside, the play is truly the thing here — in the performances and the cohesive staging.
Patsy Ferran is a powerhouse as the fluttering, nuanced, mannered Southern belle mysteriously down on her luck, trying to make everything ‘nice’. Who, after a bewildering multi-transport journey, is no longer an English school teacher battling to keep the family former Plantation together; instead living in an uncomfortable two room apartment in a run-down/economically deprived neighbourhood with her sister and brother-in-law…and a heap of uncomfortable tension. And no privacy bar one bathroom door. All in the most un-Elysian of Elysian Fields. Indeed, you could begin to think it all Greek — Stanley a constraining Hades, Stella a Persephone and Blanche the Demeter who’s come to bring light, life and rarified manners back to the dark underworld.
Framing the production to focus on the women, this is a drama in which women are routinely and shockingly domestically abused. Women are slapped, beaten, thrown around, shrieked at, ignored, terrorised in their own homes and through their neighbourhoods. Marital fights are treated as routine. Thankfully some of the men try to stop it, all falling on Stanley when he attacks his wife at a game. Nonetheless, at other times, everyone steps back and lets it happen, as a seeming ordinary and expected part of life. As Paul Mescal’s Stanley Stella Kowalski declares ‘ he is the King’ and what he does and says is the rule of law in his home.
Unlike other productions I’ve seen, Ferran’s Blanche DuBois is intelligent; she also knows when something isn’t right. And that something is her sister’s intense and increasingly unhealthy relationship with a man who just can’t wait to be King and rule over everyone and everything, with his fists and his feet if necessary. She tries to persuade her sister Stella (Anjana Vasan) to see the truth, but she won’t or can’t. Nor is her husband above disrespecting his sister-in-law’s privacy, rifling through her trunk for saleables and eventually trapping her, just as other women are trapped in the play.
Moreover, this is a play about women being trapped — socially, economically, by horrible men (abusive or stereotypers or a money-status focused nasty brother-in-law), by love and desire, by their own dreams and ambitions, by the actual truth and the ‘truths’ they choose to see or believe in. Blanche DuBois dreams of lavish Hollywood romance, dreamy pampering, comfort and gallant riches — what she gets is bad and no romance. Like her rhinestone diadem, she is faking it and very much not making it.
Mirroring an American version of a ‘kitchen sink’ drama, gender, class and power all clash against one another as Stanley prowls and boots his way around the home, and Blanche bathes them dry. Seething away at the centre is a post-war America trying to work out who and what it wants to be.
From the get-go, Stanley and Blanche clash — both are powerful people, used to being waited on. Pity Stella as she runs around after them all — with shirts, vests, coca cola and alcohol chasers, and towels. Blanche’s is the better clash, rather than being a snob or grandee, she is very concerned and insightful about her sister’s situation. Stella keeps warning Blanche about her husband and his gamester friends, and tries to keep her out of the way as much as possible. Stanley, meanwhile, thinks Blanche has stolen the family silver and spent it all on fashion — and he’s out to get Blanche, to expose and humiliate her, and put her in her place. He also wants Stella on his side, increasingly bad-mouthing her sister to her. Again, pity Stella as she becomes an emotional tug-’o’-war between these two.
Cleverly framing the play alongside the women is the theme of recently returned American servicemen — Stanley and his friends have all served in World War Two, and returned to what?… You also start to wonder what they’ve seen and experienced as they never mention their war experiences. Perhaps they are trapped too, in this civilian world, as Blanche is, by trauma and memories. Somehow, Stella has also got to birth a baby in the tiny apartment and angry neighbourhood — a piece of news she’s keeping from her sister. Not that Stanley holds back.
Rather than being a refined old maid, Ferran’s DuBois pronounces on the world, worries for and protects her sister, and faces up to Stanley’s bullying and aggression — until he traps her and attacks her. The sense of domestic violence is very real here — the growing tension, control and petulance, the unprovoked outbursts. Stanley suddenly slaps his pregnant wife in public, infront of his friends, all because she asked him to stop partying at 2.30am. Increasingly, Stanley does the same against all the women in his world. He isn’t the only one as a strong woman finds she can’t express herself any longer to her husband- instead this results in violence, fear and hurt.
Clearly, the only good women in this drama are silent ones, clearing up the mess. Stella removes herself from her husband, but very sadly, goes back to him, and the cycle starts again. Another over-arching theme, husbands treating their wives very, very badly.
Like Stanley, Blanche enjoys her power and isn’t above flirting with her brother-in-law, inviting him to zip her elegant dress up. She delights in draped flounced dresses, dresses with style and presence, with loveliness and beauty — incongruously looking like she’s about to join a garden party at any moment. No wonder she can’t resist popping a Chinese lantern over a bare lightbulb. At the same time, we see her delusions, her dreams contrasted with the stark reality of who and what she may really be and what happened in her early marriage. No wonder she clings ferociously to her mouldering stash of love letters and of how much she loved her handsome young husband — rather than the truth. Blanche is also battling misery, self-destruction and addiction as she gulps down alcohol and politely tries not to. But we feel her compulsion as she places and watches glasses and bottles at a distance and refuses the offer of another drink.
Rather than showing a horrible attack, the staging shows Stanley’s trapping of Blanche as predator against prey, and in a voluminous prom-dress/bridal number, Blanche loses all her layers, rippled and troubled in the shadows as Stanley bizarrely blames her and claims it’s destiny, that she had it coming, it was bound to happen. It;s her fault. The layers of her dress are like the layers of ‘evidence’ Stanley has walled up against her. And perhaps he feels that he just can, that she deserves it, it’s retribution, as he’s dug up her back story — of her real behaviour back in her home town, her real reputation, her apparent degeneration and killed dead her budding relationship and possible marriage with his army mate Mitch (Dwane Walcott). All in the name of good buddy friendship, apparently. Somehow he thinks he’s combatting hypocrisy — without looking once in the mirror.
Instead, we get the sense of the pain and horror of what’s been done to her as she washes herself to get clean, collapsing as she can’t. The tragic moment when Blanche tries to scrub herself clean and crumples onto the floor in a sad heap is deeply pitiable. And then, Stanley and Stella try to bundle Blanche off as a prisoner essentially to an asylum, a hospital. Stella’s heard her sister’s story and horribly chooses Stanley over her sister, to portray Blanche as fantastical rather than a truth-teller, to look away and choose to not hear or see. There’s a fraught slow-mo moment as Blanche tries and fails to run, to escape — we feel her vulnerability and fragility, her exposure. And the horror of her life to come with a surly nurse and serious, possibly dodgy, doctor.
A working-class self-confessed patriot, Stanley behaves confrontationally from the beginning — pulling off sweaty clothes to change infront of his wife and sister-in-law, blocking doorways, establishing presence and fighting everyone. And yet he also has to deal with classicism, ethnic slurs, othering, being treated almost as another species and socio-cultural assumptions. He enjoys the love of, almost adoration or worship from his wife, and having possessive power over her. Ownership. What he doesn’t like is Blanche — and gives her a one-way bus ticket back home — on her birthday. Blanche fights back by dreaming up a rescuing rich knightly businessman beau to save her — and her desperate phone calls to get herself out of Stanley’s grasp and evil intent rend the heart. Ominously, Blanche has already called Stanley out on the kind of man he is and what he’s likely to do to any women around him several acts earlier. As an audience, we all long for Blanche to get out of there, to run for her life — and she can’t. She’s always being held back and knocked down.
Because Paul Mescal is so charming in real life, it is hard to reconcile him in this ugly role. Whilst he very much does his best, acting powerfully, spitting, kicking and creating havoc, you can’t always believe in his Stanley fully. Paul Mescal just isn’t beastial even when he’s beastly — he’s merely horrid. At the same time, you can’t help but mentally impose Marlon Brando on whichever actor’s playing Stanley. Be that as it may, Mescal’s Stanley rant-athon about the Napoleonic Code — and what’s hers is very much mine — is a tour-de-force. However, you do 100% believe in Patsy Ferran’s Blanche DuBois, Anjana Vasan’s Stella Kowalski, the Hubbels (Janet Etuk and Alexander Eliot).
In a typical stripped down minimal props UK staging, Rebecca Frecknall powerfully conjures up a neighbourhood, enhanced by the cast sitting around the wings of the stage and up and around a fire escape and balcony. Channeling Whiplash, the drama is accentuated by jazz drumming and jazz dance choreography reminiscent of the jungle scenes in Queer. The drumming heightens the emotion and tension, the seething inescapable heat — and sometimes the cast even speak along to the beat like spoken word poets. As in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof at the Almeida, this production is also haunted by a ghostly lover — this time the dancing one of a beautiful boy, a dead young husband. Only he is forever dying a stylised death because of his own painful secrets.
Blanche herself is beginning to unravel as the pain of the past and the disappointment of the present leak out of her — until it becomes a flood. Utilising a singer alongside the drummer, we get jazz scat; reminiscing to enticing Mexican dance songs — conjured up a flower offering Spanish dancer or perhaps sighing dancing flower seller — a whole soundscape. Yellow light, plunging shadow, occasional stark strip lighting and indoor rain on the stage bring everything to life, designed by Lee Curran and Peter Rice. The cast move around the edge of the square bare board stage increasing the sense of limited, restricted living — and how they are literally all squashed together, on top of each other — everyone knows everyone else’s business. And there’s no escape from each other. Blanche’s last desperate flight is done in rainy slo-mo, a last attempt at cleansing her life, which doesn’t work in such an ethically noxious situation.
Mitch disappoints — starting off as a gentle gentleman and admirer, he ends up rejecting Blanche as unclean, too impure to be invited home or married. Though he appears different, he isn’t. And we see something of Blanche’s struggle as she tries to force herself into romance with an ordinary guy she finds dull and unexciting. At the same time, Mitch must feel used by a woman who is used to having power over others.
At the heart of this play is another framing of clean vs unclean; partly shown in Stella’s neighbour’s observation about Stella not being able to keep her place ‘nice’, and of who is judged to be socially clean or unclean, acceptable or despised, strong or weak. We also see this in the lighting as light and shadow, coloured vs stark white lighting strips lead the audience in the emotional temperature of the play.
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