A Streetcar Named Desire has always depended on the greatness of its three central performances. This sounds like a risky bet for any production, but audiences have rarely been disappointed. Take, for example, Elia Kazan’s 1951 film adaptation, which famously featured Vivien Leigh as Southern belle Blanche DuBois, with Kim Hunter as her sister Stella and Marlon Brando defining an archetype of machismo as Stella’s husband, Stanley Kowalski. In 2014 at London’s Young Vic, Ben Foster’s stocky Stanley bullied and broke Gillian Anderson’s woozy, girlish Blanche, alongside Vanessa Kirby’s Stella. Most recently, Patsy Ferran was a palpably fragile Blanche to a Stella who appeared in equally fraught denial, played by Anjana Vasan, and an intensely menacing Paul Mescal at London’s Almeida (and later West End).
After inspiring so many electric performances, it hardly feels like a play at all – more like a vehicle for charisma. Perhaps this is what makes Josh Seymour’s production of the play at the Crucible feel like a let down. His rendition shows that, without such an intoxicating trio, Streetcar risks running out of road.
Streetcar tells the story of Blanche, an English teacher who comes to visit her sister in New Orleans, claiming to be on leave for ill health. At first, Stella is delighted to see her, but it’s not long before Blanche’s lies strain the household. These lies will stretch from the reason she left her job to a catalogue of collapsed relationships. Meanwhile Blanche’s suitcase spews impossibly glitzy garments, letters and papers as falsehoods and twisted truths spill out of her – it’s the play that makes real the idea of emotional baggage. But it’s baggage that Blanche’s brother-in-law Stanley refuses to accommodate, with increasing hostility.
Seymour’s production has the bare doorframes, invisible walls and cramped feel to the apartment first seen in Benedict Andrews’ 2014 Young Vic production. But it’s not identical. In Seymour’s version, a balcony houses neighbouring apartments whose occupants bicker like Stanley, Stella and Blanche, and layers of gauzy curtains hang in front of the back wall. All of this creates a suitably languid atmosphere for a place where Blanche will talk about loving long rainy afternoons.
But don’t let the lyricism deceive you. Beneath Blanche’s flowery lines, the play is powered by a ruthless struggle for power between the central trio – something which means these three performances aren’t just important, they’re the lifeblood of the play.
Stanley makes clear from the start that he perceives Blanche as a threat to his access to the family inheritance through his wife – and therefore a threat to his masculinity. As he lashes out, Stella is caught in the crossfire between deciding which future is safer: one built on the fallacy and hedonism of her sister or the aggression and control of her husband. It can be easy to sideline Stella as collateral damage, but without a close sisterly relationship, the tug of war needed to drive the play is absent. And while Stella may be less vivid than the other two characters to the audience, that isn’t how Blanche and Stanley relate to her: after all, she’s Blanche’s lifeline from being jettisoned into total delusion. Blanche needs to be invested in her sister and therefore entirely unable to compute her sister standing by Stanley and their marriage in all its ugliness and imperfection.
Jake Dunn’s Stanley stops this marriage from appearing nearly ugly enough, however. His performance could hardly be further from his character’s descriptions. Dunn renders the hollering and howling on the page as tepid whimpers. Rather than harbouring an inner thug or brute, he is quiet, weak and unintimidating. This portrayal of Stanley builds on the possibility that Blanche is being excessively paranoid when she accuses him of being her “executioner” who will “destroy” her. But it also completely defangs the drama. Where is the ferocity of a man Blanche calls “bestial”, “animal” and “subhuman”?
He enters with his hand fisted inside his shirt. When his hand is out of it, he wildly overgesticulates, endlessly thrusting his arms as if to compensate for his lack of driving force. He swings around the apartment like the ape Blanche calls him or bends over furniture in an attempt to illustrate a looming presence. To create a convincing clamour, he has to hurl himself and props around: plates clang and crash on the floor like cymbals, and much of the first half is punctuated by the thud and slam of her trunk. All of his calculated behaviour to oust Blanche seems done on a whim – he declares “I am the king around here”, but to us, he seems at most a boisterous court jester. Even when he deliberately disobeys his wife’s wishes by revealing a secret she has to Blanche, there’s no sense of sinister taunting in the revelation. The production has to literally cover him in oil and grease to rough him up in one scene.
With Dunn too busy whirring around to allow any desire and lust to simmer between Stanley and Blanche, the lights might crackle but there’s barely any powder-keg tension. The dangling canopy of bulbs works better, however, suggesting lights climbing into the sky like a vision from Blanche’s imagination. These same lights grow colder and more sterile towards the end as things get bleaker for Blanche. But elsewhere lighting is too literal. Blanche frequently refers to light – both attracted to its warmth and fearful of its exposure. So it seems unnecessary for one moment to flood her with stage spotlights at the pull of a cord, in case we might not otherwise have got the point that she’s been finally exposed to its “merciless glare”.
Joanna Vanderham’s performance as the Southern belle suggests that Blanche takes out her exasperation with her own life on her sister. She grabs Stella’s shoulders as though confronting her reflection in a mirror, frustrated that she doesn’t share her quixotic romanticism and desire for a better life. She’s often dressed like a ballerina on a music box, while languorously delivering lines like “when an hour isn’t just an hour, but a little piece of eternity dropped into your hands”. Her desperation manifests as a fickleness about knowing what she wants and why she wants it – she swaps out stories and entertains the idea of different male partners like trying on one of her outfits, wrapping a feather boa around herself and seeing if she likes the feel of it. But she often seems remarkably composed, not quite brittle or jittery enough.
Amara Okereke, meanwhile, never really finds a way into Stella. Which leaves us with no way into understanding all her complicated choices, not least returning to Stanley after he hits her. It also limits our ability to identify with her in the story – she, like us, feeling torn between wanting to protect and distance herself from Blanche.
As Blanche spirals, so does the revolving stage. But where Blanche’s disintegration has been incremental in other actors’ performances, Vanderham makes a clear, stark shift following a particularly traumatic scene with Stanley. Her register becomes flat, her face fixed in a blank look. The effect is her being shattered by a single act of violence, rather than the cumulative force of a woman succumbing to the weight of all her lies and their scrutiny. There’s an impact in seeing Vanderham so convincingly shellshocked by being confronted with the horrors of which the real world is capable. The scales seem to fall from her eyes and she’s left with nothing. However, the event should spur on her retreat into the all-consuming fantasy that sees her institutionalised. Instead, by dropping the affectations and lilting voice, she seems more real than she’s ever been.
This performance runs counter to playwright Tennessee Williams’ predilection for the slow burn. He avoids sudden escalations or sheer drops into catastrophe, shifting gears gradually, so the conflicts and crashes take place in agonising slow motion. By contrast, Vanderham’s rendition of Blanche goes from getting by to being entirely broken in a single scene change.
And it’s not just the cast who drive the play into jarring directions. Seymour’s production tips into overstylisation – not for the first time. His production of Spend Spend Spend at Manchester’s Royal Exchange in November last year also displayed a tendency to overstate. A freeze frame would suspend the aftermath of a man striking a woman’s face, for instance. Here, he directs an expressionistic sequence for a moment of violence where the tearing of a sheet dramatically reverberates across the set in a way that feels appropriately bracing, but is such a highly theatrical sequence that it steals our focus from the character. Throughout the show, sultry jazz and tinkling piano casts it all in dream. But anyone unsure whether a line is significant or symbolic only has to look out for the piano halting and the lights snapping at the mention of loss and loneliness.
Just as Dunn’s Stanley endlessly strips off, Seymour’s production feels compelled to constantly bare the play’s chest, to make all subtext naked. The most extreme intervention sees an actor intermittently float around as the ghost of Blanche’s lover whose death catalysed her descent into despair. As if that hadn’t made her emotional crisis obvious enough, this ghost even sings “I’m afraid this masquerade is over” at her from David Porter’s song. And when he’s not doing that, he’s pressing against her through a curtain, embracing her in a bathtub or kneeling at her feet like a dog. But this is a play about peeling away illusion, not piling it on. Of all the mistakes in Seymour’s production, the one it suffers from most is the same one that brings down Blanche: it leans too heavily into her lies and tries too desperately to make them real.
23 Comments
I don’t normally believe in judging the past by the standards of the present, but I’ve always found “Streetcar” a very disturbing play. SPOILER ALERT. Read no further if you don’t want to know about the plot.
Blanche arrives in the Stella/Stanley household already very emotionally disturbed by terrible life experiences, and also pretty much penniless. She’s antipathetic to her sister’s marriage to Stanley, and alternates her relationship with Stanley between overt contempt for him and winding him up sexually. She’s pretty unwell anyway, and her solutions to her problems are unwise: installing herself in her sister’s tiny flat, and fastening herself on one of Stanley’s inadequate friends to form a relationship that will “solve” her life problems are unwise. Obviously she needs to find a job that will enable her to rent a flat and get some therapy. The play’s climax, and the final wreck of Blanche’s sanity is Stanley’s rape of her.
Uurrgghh. Well, that shouldn’t have happened, should it. But in addition to the playwright’s cruelty to Blanche, he is equally patronising to Stanley. For example, in the stage directions, he refers to him as a “gaudy seed-bearer.”
As always with Tennessee Williams, I find his sadism towards his female characters intense and horrible, and I can’t lose the impression that he’s a gay bloke who wants revenge on Nature generally and women in particular for having been gay at a time when life was pretty wretched for gay men.
Well, I’m sympathetic. And I dare say that the play was everything playgoers wanted in the early 1960s. But basically it’s a museum piece, and I’m surprised that anyone would want to revive it.
Credit goes to the director and actor for attempting to make Stanley into something other than the mighty meaty male stereotype whom the playwright would clearly have liked to, er, embrace, but as the reviewer has unconsciously demonstrated, this has only succeeded in muddling the play’s springs of action.
Oh FFS, let’s get back to “Hamlet” (William Shakespeare) in which the hero is sufficiently horrible to his hapless girlfriend to gratify anyone’s tastes, but in which there is still plenty of wondrous stuff to be found
Absolutely brilliant and very moving production, seen today 08/03/25. Very moving and moved me to tears especially the second half
I disagree with the overall judgement of the review. It’s a play about disappointment and failure. No one is happy and by the end of the play everyone is damaged. In this production all the main characters apart from Blanche are younger than usually cast, emphasising her personal and professional failures.
I could have done with less of the presence of the ghostly young husband, but it did add a non-realistic element to a play that is often about heightened reality.
I do think we should talk about colour blind casting; I think it got in the way here whereas an all black production would genuinely help an audience see the play differently. There was an all black production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof that achieved just that.
Word of praise for the design which made the play flow and kept the action in full view throughout
I don’t feel critical about your summary, Gareth, but I have to ask in what precise way is Stanley damaged? He’s had sex with Blanche - might not have been the best sex ever, due to lack of consent, but he had what there was. Stella his wife carries on as normal, refusing to believe that her husband has raped her sister. Plus Stella has just presented him with a bouncing new baby. How has he lost? The play gives no indication that he feels any guilt, or that he will look back with regret on what he has done. Just a thought!
Stanley came back from the war a damaged man. He’s incapable of empathy, has to control everyone around him, and how long do you feel his marriage will last? Stella can’t trust him, her primary relationship will be with her child. I see no happiness in his future, or anyone else’s for that matter
The set and design was brilliant
I’ve not seen the play but as theatre reviews go, this is a really good write up. Worth £8 a month - keep it up 👍🏻
I agree! Very thoughtful, informed and thorough review.
I thought nice use of some well chosen and powerful photographs to accompany this piece
A well written piece but tbh I’ve never seen the point of long negative reviews. You didn’t like it, you told us, others will disagree, move on. This isn’t news, it doesn’t warrant more than a paragraph.
This is an unjustifiably harsh review which misses a lot of the subtleties of a powerful and imaginative production. Why wasn’t Stanley more macho? Because the characterisation of him as ape-like and common was not the reality but rather arose from Blanche’s need to project those qualities onto him in order to protect her fragile and disintegrating sense of self as a refined Southern belle, the person she had envisaged being from childhood. Far from ‘failing to feel herself into the role of Stella’, Okereke gave us a moving depiction of an alternative way of coping with disappointment: focus on the love and joy to be found in the reality of the present, even if it’s not everything you hoped for. You don’t have to agree with that attitude to appreciate Okereke’s performance of it. Her love for her sister was perfectly credible in this context, and also essential for helping the audience stay patient with Blanche, who was, rightly, often irritating to the point of excruciating. And as for why Stella went back to Stanley when he hit her - where else was she supposed to go? The powerlessness of women is a key theme in this play but it seems to have escaped this reviewer. As for the spectral appearances of Blanche’s first lover, these were imaginative and effective ways of communicating the unbreakable hold of unresolved trauma. And of course Blanche was more real than she had ever been when the impossibility of continuing to live with Stella and Stanley became clear to her - that was the point at which she could no longer hide from reality and therefore broke down. It will be a shame if Tribune readers miss out on a truly thought-provoking and psychologically astute piece of theatre because of this review.
Having not seen any production of this play I am somewhat alarmed by the harsh criticism of the reviewer. However as I’m looking forward to seeing The Crucible production on 28th March, I will keep an open mind and form my own opinion. I rarely agree with critics anyway.
This review is a curious reading of the play as well as of the production. Her lover’s death catalysed a descent into despair? There’s somewhat more to it than that. A particularly traumatic scene with Stanley? I guess that’s one way to describe rape.
After the rape, it’s over for Blanche. The review suggests we see a sudden degeneration not a progressive unwinding, but that just seems wrong to me. We saw quite clearly delineated Blanche falling apart while struggling to maintain appearances, so that the final scenes would have been unexpected to characters in the play but not to an audience (imagining there could be an audience not watching this through the prisms of film and other stagings).
As to the hatchet job on Dunn/Stanley, that seems so over the top to me that I almost question the good faith. It’s an entirely legitimate toning down from Brandoesque archetypes into someone confused and inconsistent, with a touching chemistry with his wife.
This review is something of an outlier. Don’t be put off going by it.
Three of us went to see this on Saturday (8th March) and we pretty much all agreed with the general gist of this review.
That said, it’s good to have the Crucible put on a serious play and, whatever you might think about the specific performances and production, there is a lot of depth to the characters and we found plenty to talk about after.
We saw this play on Saturday, and I thought the review was unduly harsh. I agree with the reviewer’s doubt about the manifestation of the ghostly presence of Blanche’s lost love. But it’s a powerful play, and we thought that most of the performances, especially the two leading women, were very good. My worry about the tone of the review is that, had I not already had tickets, I might have been dissuaded from going, which would have been a shame.
Seems like an unnecessarily harsh review. There is no Paul Mescal or Gillian Anderson but that’s an exceptionally high bar to measure against. I found Dunn very believable and menacing. Overall, I wonder whether the intention of the production was to lean more into the idea that Blanche was being gaslighted by Stanley than her being portrayed as a liar/fantasist. Certainly a more modern take. I also had no issue with the more sudden disintegration of Blanche’s character following her being attacked/raped, I found it an incredibly traumatising approach. Perhaps the reviewer goes to the theatre too often to provide an objective account.
I read this review and wondered if we’d seen the same play, I gave it five stars in my review for Northern Soul: https://www.northernsoul.me.uk/streetcar-desire-crucible-sheffield/ all art is subjective, of course, and everyone is entitled to their opinion, but personally I loved it and hope nobody is put off going to see it after reading the Tribune’s review.
Fascinating. Im off to see it this evening and will be interested to see what I make of it. I can be critical but this review takes criticism to new heights. Excessively long...were they writing an essay for college? Tho that ghost thing does sound a bit shit ;-)
If I hadn’t already bought tickets when I read the review I probably would have given the play a miss. Thankfully we did go this evening and were impressed by the play and unimpressed by the review. If any reader is in doubt I’d say say go, support live theatre and make your own mind up.
The line that Dunn’s Stanley was “quiet, weak and unintimidating. ” left me wondering if we’d seen the same play. For me Stanley had all the menace and stalking violence, so familiar, of men who may explode at any moment. If Stella’s character didn’t come through it was because the performances of Stanley and Blanche were so strong. I’ll grant that some of the directorial choices (including the lighting) didn’t quite land, or maybe just aren’t to taste, but this is still a great play. Maybe the reviewer is a little jaded by being too familiar with other versions (not a disadvantage I suffer).
Saw this last night. While its not the play for me (little sympathy for Blanche...) I didnt find Stanley weak etc. He came across as quite accurate. (as someone eho knows C&C men). Tho the ghost character was ok the problem was the very poor casting, he should have been tall, young, handsome, lean, not short n tubby. We all agreed on this.
And were the costume techs wreaking some weird revenge on the blokes? Giving them trousers that spent alot of time up their bums...very distracting.
Plus an odd use of props folk in interval. Like they had been told to entertain audience by excess fannying about needlessly redressing set!
And dont forget it was all set in a very hot, humid atmosphere, making everyone short-tempered, would have been fun to crank up the heating in theatre to reflect this ;-)
NB i was very impressed at how the rape scene was portrayed. That was very well done, esp difficult on a stage in the round with the audience so close.
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I thoroughly enjoyed this production. Your review is very harsh. I agree that Stanley was a little weak but the rest of the cast did really well. A powerful, atmospheric production.