I Don’t Want Realism: ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’ Review

★★★★✰

It starts with a cacophony of drums, the hustle and bustle of New Orleans throbbing in the summer heat. Out steps Patsy Ferran’s Blanche, almost floating above it all, wrapped in an ethereal rose print dress. By the end the dress has vanished: Blanche is psychologically stripped, tormented, and torn down to the sordid earth.

The Almeida’s new production of Tennessee William’s magnum opus has been billed as the hottest ticket in town. Credit to the theatre world’s soothsayers, it sold out pretty much instantly. It doesn’t take a hairy ape to work out why: helmed by Rebecca Frecknall, still riding high after her Olivier Award-doused production of Cabaret, and starring Paul Mescal, an actor who needs no introduction.

Frecknall certainly doesn’t rest on her laurels. The stage is an austere square with audience on all sides, an ominous blank canvas and a near insurmountable challenge for a director of lesser creative audacity. She paints the stage with broad expressionist brushstrokes- her cast are luminous flashes of colour, throbbing, swaying, and wriggling like animals in an enclosure. It’s grubby and unhygienic; we breathe bestial air, pungent sweat, and uninhabited hormones running riot. A Francis Bacon painting injected with a theatrical jolt of electricity.

The production has a palpable heartbeat thanks to drummer Tom Penn. The live soundtrack animates and accents Blanche’s psychological decline. Each hiss, shudder, and rattle is a screaming nerve twisted in pain. Blanche doesn’t so much unravel but crumble into dust. Mescal’s Stanley is biding his time waiting to blow what remains of her away. Blanche is thrust front and centre, but the production is not a precision orientated surgical examination but rather a brutal hack job; Stanley wields the blunt knife. It’s a thrilling change in pace for an actor who carved a name for himself with vulnerable male roles, the polar opposite of Stanley Kowalski.

This Mescal is the antithesis to the Mescal of the critically acclaimed Normal People or indie darling of Aftersun. This Mescal is a cold-blooded reptile. Sometimes snake-like, polite and gentle with a saccharine smile when he first meets the naïve Blanche. Behind the facade is a forked tongue and venomous fangs ready to inject toxic venom into his prey.

Anjana Vasan’s Stella is hypnotised by him. She defends her husband coldly, regurgitating excuses defending his abuse like an automation. The resonance is all the more chilling today where concepts like “gaslighting” and “toxic masculinity” exist in forefront of discourse about abuse and patriarchy; projecting our own epistemology onto the play is a testament to its artistic power.

Whilst Mescal brings the star power it is Patsy Ferran who steals the show, consistently delivering a devastatingly knockout performance as Blanche. She is no stranger to working with Frecknall nor working on a Tennessee Williams play at the Almeida. Their last outing Summer and Smoke enjoyed a west end transfer and earned Ferran an Olivier.

The actress is noticeably young for a character who perennially expresses anxiety about her old age, something that will no doubt aggrieve purists. It’s their loss, her youth tragically exacerbates Blanche’s delusion; she’s not really an old maid, it’s just her agonized psyche magnifying the tiniest imperfection to swallow her whole. Come for Mescal, stay for Ferran, and leave with shock and horror that reverberates across generations and makes Streetcar the enduring classic of 20th century theatre that it is.

Words by Alexander Cohen

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