Theater Review | 'A Streetcar Named Desire'
A Blanche of Doomed Beauty, Guiding a Brilliant 'Streetcar'
LONDON - Rachel Weisz appears slowly, haltingly, at the start of the new London revival of “A Streetcar Named Desire,” her Blanche DuBois stepping tentatively into an alien landscape that on some level this fragile soul seems to know may finish her off. But in precisely the sort of exhilarating paradox on which the theater thrives, I’ve never seen a Blanche so fully in command of the contradictions that drive the heroine of Tennessee Williams’s play. Audiences at the Donmar Warehouse have until Oct. 3 to see for themselves.
That’s not to say that Ms. Weisz, marking her return to the London theater after eight years - since which time she has, of course, won an Oscar for “The Constant Gardener” - is in any way overdetermined in her effects. Far from it: One of the hallmarks of this British actress’s unimaginably moving occupancy of the American theater’s equivalent to, say, “Hamlet,” is the way her emotional reach seems to arrive unbidden. It overtakes her audience in much the same way that Blanche’s baleful past rises up in surging reports from the front line of grief to overwhelm her present.
And whereas previous “Streetcars” have tended to direct attention toward this play’s Everest-like male challenge, the role of Blanche’s hulking nemesis, Stanley Kowalski (which actors inevitably climb in the shadow of Marlon Brando), Rob Ashford’s current production refocuses its attentions squarely on Blanche. That in itself serves as a reminder that the original Broadway production gave top billing to the late, and legendary, Jessica Tandy, even if it was Brando whose sweaty T-shirt and brute force, dually immortalized in the Elia Kazan film, enflamed the imaginations of generations to come.
Ms. Weisz has previously charted the blasted female psyche that remains a Williams specialty in an indifferent 1999 West End revival of “Suddenly Last Summer,” which in no way hinted at her achievement here. She is unique among the Blanches I have encountered in communicating afresh the full weight of the delusional Mississippian’s need to put on a performance: to stage a life for herself defined by beauty, poetry and grace even if the reality of her experience is one of heartache and abiding loss.
Remarking early on “I’ve got to keep a hold of myself,” Ms. Weisz’s Blanche visibly gathers herself for entry into the bruising new world that she will encounter in the presence of her younger sister, Stella (Ruth Wilson). Among company, this Blanche tells stories, gently flirts, and makes a theatrical set piece out of emerging from long, lingering baths, hair wrapped in a towel that contains its own come-hither possibilities.
Left alone, she can’t keep from revisiting the horrors of a past that Mr. Ashford delivers up in an appropriately spectral manner, Blanche’s habit of living anew life’s abrasions leading toward an unexpected nod in the direction of “Macbeth.” Loneliness, too, looms scarily large for a Blanche who finds solace, however brief, in Stanley’s poker-playing buddy, Mitch, whose own acquaintanceship with mortality in the guise of an ailing, if unseen, mother strikes a truly resonant chord with Blanche.
Barnaby Kay’s tremendous Mitch - the evening’s other standout performance - at one point hoists Blanche amorously aloft, in unwitting repetition of a coital encounter we have recently witnessed between Stanley and Stella. So it’s with particular force that we feel Mitch’s disappointment when his feelings for Blanche come crashing down, Mr. Kay seeming himself to become as soiled as the mothlike Blanche, whose purity in his eyes has flamed out.
Working wonders within the compact, unusually high-walled Donmar space, Mr. Ashford creates a vivid sense of community without attempting the operatic overkill that marred London’s last “Streetcar,” in which a firm-jawed Glenn Close looked as if she could thump Iain Glen’s fine-boned Stanley for keeps. Ms. Wilson, a very sweet Stella if arguably physically too slight for the part, really does look as if she could be sisters with Ms. Weisz, and there’s not much possibility that anyone, much less Blanche, could take on Elliot Cowan’s muscle-bound Stanley, whom this Stella clearly adores even at his most bestial. Mr. Cowan, indeed, is so physically right for the part that it seems doubly sad that he is let down in that common English theater boondoggle of the accent, his vocals certainly loud enough to honor Stanley’s frequent brays but tending eccentrically to veer between Polish and the American South.
Christopher Oram’s beautiful set pushes the New Orleans tenement out into the very fabric of the Donmar, Neil Austin’s lighting abetting Adam Cork’s fevered sound design to delineate the point at which reverie topples over into nightmare. It’s often said that Blanche is a survivor and that, much like the characters that drive another great Southern writer, William Faulkner, she will endure. Not here. Cowering as she is led away at the close, Ms. Weisz in her Della Robbia blue is headed only one direction, and unforgettably so: To her doom.
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LONDON - Rachel Weisz appears slowly, haltingly, at the start of the new London revival of “A Streetcar Named Desire,” her Blanche DuBois stepping tentatively into an alien landscape that on some level this fragile soul seems to know may finish her off. But in precisely the sort of exhilarating paradox on which the theater thrives, I’ve never seen a Blanche so fully in command of the contradictions that drive the heroine of Tennessee Williams’s play. Audiences at the Donmar Warehouse have until Oct. 3 to see for themselves.
That’s not to say that Ms. Weisz, marking her return to the London theater after eight years - since which time she has, of course, won an Oscar for “The Constant Gardener” - is in any way overdetermined in her effects. Far from it: One of the hallmarks of this British actress’s unimaginably moving occupancy of the American theater’s equivalent to, say, “Hamlet,” is the way her emotional reach seems to arrive unbidden. It overtakes her audience in much the same way that Blanche’s baleful past rises up in surging reports from the front line of grief to overwhelm her present.
And whereas previous “Streetcars” have tended to direct attention toward this play’s Everest-like male challenge, the role of Blanche’s hulking nemesis, Stanley Kowalski (which actors inevitably climb in the shadow of Marlon Brando), Rob Ashford’s current production refocuses its attentions squarely on Blanche. That in itself serves as a reminder that the original Broadway production gave top billing to the late, and legendary, Jessica Tandy, even if it was Brando whose sweaty T-shirt and brute force, dually immortalized in the Elia Kazan film, enflamed the imaginations of generations to come.
Ms. Weisz has previously charted the blasted female psyche that remains a Williams specialty in an indifferent 1999 West End revival of “Suddenly Last Summer,” which in no way hinted at her achievement here. She is unique among the Blanches I have encountered in communicating afresh the full weight of the delusional Mississippian’s need to put on a performance: to stage a life for herself defined by beauty, poetry and grace even if the reality of her experience is one of heartache and abiding loss.
Remarking early on “I’ve got to keep a hold of myself,” Ms. Weisz’s Blanche visibly gathers herself for entry into the bruising new world that she will encounter in the presence of her younger sister, Stella (Ruth Wilson). Among company, this Blanche tells stories, gently flirts, and makes a theatrical set piece out of emerging from long, lingering baths, hair wrapped in a towel that contains its own come-hither possibilities.
Left alone, she can’t keep from revisiting the horrors of a past that Mr. Ashford delivers up in an appropriately spectral manner, Blanche’s habit of living anew life’s abrasions leading toward an unexpected nod in the direction of “Macbeth.” Loneliness, too, looms scarily large for a Blanche who finds solace, however brief, in Stanley’s poker-playing buddy, Mitch, whose own acquaintanceship with mortality in the guise of an ailing, if unseen, mother strikes a truly resonant chord with Blanche.
Barnaby Kay’s tremendous Mitch - the evening’s other standout performance - at one point hoists Blanche amorously aloft, in unwitting repetition of a coital encounter we have recently witnessed between Stanley and Stella. So it’s with particular force that we feel Mitch’s disappointment when his feelings for Blanche come crashing down, Mr. Kay seeming himself to become as soiled as the mothlike Blanche, whose purity in his eyes has flamed out.
Working wonders within the compact, unusually high-walled Donmar space, Mr. Ashford creates a vivid sense of community without attempting the operatic overkill that marred London’s last “Streetcar,” in which a firm-jawed Glenn Close looked as if she could thump Iain Glen’s fine-boned Stanley for keeps. Ms. Wilson, a very sweet Stella if arguably physically too slight for the part, really does look as if she could be sisters with Ms. Weisz, and there’s not much possibility that anyone, much less Blanche, could take on Elliot Cowan’s muscle-bound Stanley, whom this Stella clearly adores even at his most bestial. Mr. Cowan, indeed, is so physically right for the part that it seems doubly sad that he is let down in that common English theater boondoggle of the accent, his vocals certainly loud enough to honor Stanley’s frequent brays but tending eccentrically to veer between Polish and the American South.
Christopher Oram’s beautiful set pushes the New Orleans tenement out into the very fabric of the Donmar, Neil Austin’s lighting abetting Adam Cork’s fevered sound design to delineate the point at which reverie topples over into nightmare. It’s often said that Blanche is a survivor and that, much like the characters that drive another great Southern writer, William Faulkner, she will endure. Not here. Cowering as she is led away at the close, Ms. Weisz in her Della Robbia blue is headed only one direction, and unforgettably so: To her doom.
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