Streetcar a little off track
There's no doubt about A Streetcar Named Desire. Its impact on the American stage and its cinema, and the consequences of its writing and performance, are still with us 67 years after its debut.
Its tumultuous reception, the famous opening-night standing ovation, the huge critical and popular success that followed it, and the 1951 film version, suggest audiences were ready to see real life, its violence, its sexuality and the savagery with which it tears down anachronism, pretention and delusion, played as it is for what it is.
Which all makes Streetcar a tricky conveyance for its director and stars.
Blanche DuBois (Sigrid Thornton) might dominate the play but it's not about her. She is much less interesting than her sister, Stella (Jo Morris) and brother-in-law Stanley (Nathaniel Dean).
They are real people, identifiable and palpable, representative of us. Blanche is only herself, a curiosity in many ways, representing little of any abiding interest. The eradication of the old South, with its airs and graces, in the face of the modern, brutally realistic America is a legitimate theme but it's not what this play is about, or what we keep coming to it for.
We know Sigrid Thornton well, and in close up, and it's obvious from this extended season's through-the-roof box office that we like what we see. She's unconvincing here but that's largely because the part and her character are so artificial. A less- conventional production might have allowed her to break out more, to give us more Sigrid and less Blanche, if you like.
But director Kate Cherry has decided - and it's a perfectly legitimate call - to adhere closely to the play as Tennessee Williams and Elia Kazan fashioned it. Which is not to say Thornton brings nothing of herself to the part, but if you're expecting a revelation, either from the actor or her character, you're in for a disappointment.
Dean has a different problem but it's just as thorny. Just like Cheree Cassidy in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in this theatre a couple of years ago, he has a big, definitive shadow to get out from under.
For Cassidy, it was Elizabeth Taylor. For Dean, it's Marlon Brando. It must be tough to stand under a wrought-iron spiral staircase howling "Stella!" with everything you do held up against an unachievable ideal. As with Thornton, there's little in his Stan that sets him apart from the original.
Jo Morris doesn't have quite the same weight of expectation and preconception to deal with and perhaps that's why her Stella is the most convincing of the play's central characters.
She's an ideal physical match for Thornton, to begin with, and gives her character the resilience and the neediness that bind her to her crazy love.
The only other character of note, Blanche's hapless suitor Harold Mitchell, is excellently served by Luke Hewitt. He gives Harold the pain of a proud man completely out of his depth in a one-sided romance. We have no better character actor.
Tennessee Williams wasn't the most efficient manager of personnel, and a roll call of some of our leading actors - Ben D'Addario, Michael Loney, Rhoda Lopez, Steve Turner and Alison van Reeken - pick up a pay cheque here without adding much to proceedings.
Neither does Ben Collins' music, over which he solos live on sax between scenes. While it's expertly scored, it never does more than serve its purpose. Christina Smith's design, all lattice and slats, is nicely constructed but so constrained by the exigencies of the script and Williams's directions that it feels like a reproduction.
And "constraint" and "reproduction" are good words to describe this Streetcar. Its loyalty, and even its professionalism, play to the work's weaknesses, not its strengths.
And after the high, fast ride of the month of festivals we've just had, it's something of a reality check.
