A Streetcar Named Desire at Crucible Theatre – review

Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire is one of the great naturalistic plays of the post-World War Two period. Josh Seymour’s intense production for Sheffield Crucible, while preserving the drama in the exchanges between characters, adds an increasingly potent expressionistic ingredient.

The plot involves Blanche DuBois, a faded Southern belle, arriving at her sister Stella’s two-room slum dwelling in New Orleans, apparently on leave from her teaching post in Laurel, Mississippi. Stella is in a tempestuous marriage with Stanley Kowalski, who has not been informed of Blanche’s arrival and is not happy. The confrontations that periodically spring up between Blanche and Stanley are inevitable: he is frequently equable but prone to violent physical outbursts; she never accepts the loss of privacy in the apartment and also cannot avoid offending him by her constant snobbish insults – men don’t like being called animals!

However, there are specific issues. Initially, Stanley is suspicious of how Belle Reve came to be lost to the DuBois family and incessantly cites the Code Napoleon, which states that a wife’s possessions belong equally to the husband – and vice versa. Later more serious issues surface. Blanche married a young man who committed suicide after her reaction to his homosexuality – that emerges in a fabulous monologue for her just before the interval as she moves towards a relationship (or marriage?) with Mitch, Stanley’s poker-playing buddy. But she has other guiltier secrets: sex with a 17-year-old pupil and with untold partners in a sleazy hotel.

The expressionism begins with the set. Stanley and Stella’s two rooms are spread out across the Crucible’s thrust stage, with the occasional flimsy curtain. It’s up to the audience to supply the slum qualities. The balcony above has a piano, so it not only serves as the entrance to Eunice and Steve’s apartment, but from time to time in the quieter scenes, atmospheric New Orleans-style piano percolates down – and who is that young man who sings so feelingly of love? And why does that outer circle, with the contested bathroom in it, revolve so rapidly as the play goes on?

The young man, of course, is Allan, the suicidal husband (Jack Ofrecio, seemingly untainted by what Blanche saw as his depravity) who appears increasingly as her image of what a gentleman should be. The bathtub with Allan becomes Blanche’s means of escaping the sordid world that she has ended up in – and he disappears when she claims to Mitch that she has never practised cruelty – never?

For all that, the production lives and dies on its central performances – and Joanna Vanderham is stunning as Blanche. At the opening, after a few rowdy minutes with the neighbours, she appears, cool and immaculate in a pink suit, with a large portmanteau. Her disdain for the neighbours, her high-born sense of outrage that her sister lives here, are instantly evident, as are her preservation of the old world courtesies and, as time passes, her instant switch into flirtatious mode with any male, even Stanley, and her tendency to give orders as to a bank of servants at Belle Reve. As truth closes in, her grip on reality slackens and the lies grow more blatant.

The exchanges between Blanche and Stella (Amara Okereke) are all the more telling for the contrast in acting styles. Okereke plays the part deep in honesty: her desire to continue the marriage despite Blanche’s strictures and her determination not to believe the worst of Blanche. Okereke is a powerful spokesperson for tolerance. So, too, in a sense, is Bridgette Amofah as Eunice upstairs whose fights and reconciliations expose the brittleness of Blanche’s worldview.

The men, perhaps fare less well, but Marlon Brando casts a looming shadow. Jake Dunn‘s Stanley springs to life in his outbursts, convincing us of his real danger, but makes less of a mark elsewhere. As for Mitch, perhaps it always was a fairly dull part (enlivened by the wonderful Karl Malden). Tayla Kovacevic-Ebong finds it hard to animate the character, but, as with the other poker players and neighbours, plays his part in a fine production.