Paul Mescal and Patsy Ferran battle it out in the Almeida’s new production of a poetic drama whose ambiguity is enthralling
Tennessee Williams’s old bus keeps on running. The Almeida’s production of A Streetcar Named Desire, starring Patsy Ferran and directed by Rebecca Frecknall, is the play’s fifth major UK revival in the last 20 years. That’s not bad going for a work that at its 1947 New York premiere was described as the product of “an almost desperately morbid turn of mind” and two years later in London was dismissed by one critic as “a messy little anecdote”.
So why has the play lasted so well? There are multiple reasons but the most fundamental is its air of tantalising ambiguity. When Blanche DuBois floats into New Orleans’s ironically named Elysian Fields and finds herself up against her Polish-American brother-in-law, Stanley Kowalski, it seems as if we are facing a primal conflict: Blanche, quoting Hawthorne, Whitman and Poe, seems to represent the poetic spirit while Stanley’s mentality, in the words of that fine critic Harold Clurman, “provides the soil for fascism viewed not as political movement but as a state of being”. That is Blanche’s own view of the situation when she urges her sister, Stella, “In this dark march towards whatever it is we’re approaching … Don’t – don’t hang back with the brutes.”
