Running for seven weeks at the Phoenix Theatre between 20 March and 6 May 2023, Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire directed by Rebecca Frecknall is perhaps the most desirable ticket in town (I promise this is the last time I make this joke). After studying the play at A Level, joining the lengthy online queue to buy tickets was a no-brainer. Three hours after the curtain went up on the first act, my friend and I walked out of the theatre in a state of shock, rendered speechless.
So, what happened in those three hours? Blanche (Patsy Ferran), a self-fashioned southern belle, arrives at Elysian Fields, the heart of New Orleans’s melting pot. She is here to stay with her sister, Stella (Anjana Vasan), wife of Stanley (Paul Mescal). He is everything Blanche does not want to be: uncouth, unrefined, vulgar. In other words, common. Driven from her family’s ‘lost’ plantation, Belle Reve, Blanche has nowhere else to turn to but Stanley’s claustrophobic flat. Here, the play’s action unfolds, inevitably hurtling towards tragedy. In this production, drums mark both the rumbling of streetcars and the imminence of Blanche’s destruction – a musical threat that kept the entire theatre on edge. The drummer (Tom Penn) makes an appearance in the final scene, acting as the doctor to whom Blanche utters: “Whoever you are, I have always depended on the kindness of strangers”. He may have tried to warn her, but nothing can stop the tragedy once it begins.
Indulging in fantasy until the very end, Blanche explains that she doesn’t want realism, she wants magic: something soft and gentle, like the fine fabrics of her dresses that unwelcome hands can fling from her body in an instant, as they do in the play’s penultimate scene. As she drinks herself to oblivion in an unzipped ball gown, the fragility of her magic – her fantasy – is all too apparent. Nothing is more fragile than the paper lantern, Blanche’s feeble attempt to create magic and hide from the truth of her age. Mitch (Dwane Walcott), Blanche’s last hope at a happy ending, tears the lantern away, blinding the audience and revealing the façade Blanche has created. Until then, the red glow of the covered single lightbulb that hangs centre stage is an ever-present reminder of what has brought Blanche to this place that will be her ruin: a streetcar named Desire.
Desire is, unsurprisingly, the thread that holds the play together. Mescal oozes with the bestial and predatory – he prowls and races around the stage, leering over Blanche and Stella as they try to hold themselves together. After Mescal’s performance in Normal People, I was sceptical of his casting as Stanley, unsure whether he would be able to pull off this more imposing, hyper-masculine role. As his anguished cries of ‘STELLA!’ reverberated around the empty stage, the decimated remnants of domestic violence his only surroundings, I needed no further convincing that he had complete command of the role.
But there is no show-stealer. Not in terms of performances, at least. Rather, the play’s final two scenes stole the show, in every way that they could. In this production, it rains. The sexually violent climax of the penultimate scene gives way to a downpour centre stage, the rain drenching Blanche’s body, curled up in a foetal position. It is a different kind of bath to the ones she has enjoyed throughout the play, in a cruel twist of fate (side note: I wish this production had a bathtub, given that it is such a pivotal space for Blanche). Stella’s cries are all we can hear as the doctor leads Blanche away through the audience – rendered equally helpless. The lights fade to black.
Ferran’s Blanche is one fraught with nerves, unable to keep still. In this way, she both juxtaposes and mirrors Mescal’s restlessness; Ferran’s, unsurprisingly, is of a quieter, smaller kind. As she begins to unravel, Blanche shrinks as Stanley parades – peacock, tiger and serpent all at once. He has won, it would seem, in a play in which there are, in reality, no winners. Anyone who has seen Gillian Anderson’s performance as Blanche in the 2014 National Theatre production should expect something different from Ferran. Anderson’s loftiness, her contrived self-assurance, almost lures us in, whereas Ferran’s never does, as her fraught nerves are always overpowering any facade she attempts to create. Watching Ferran, I realised for the first time how funny Blanche can be, albeit often in a morbid way. Their differences are a testament to the depth of Blanche’s complexity and, indeed, to the complicated moral questions at the heart of the play.
The third of the trio, Stella, is often neglected, seen very much as third. And yet I often could not draw my eyes away from Vasan, who tidies away the mess from the preceding night’s violence as Blanche makes grand, impossible plans. While Blanche runs away with her fantasies of Shep Huntleigh, her perhaps invented knight in shining armour, Stella must live in the real world. A wife and, by the end of the play, a mother, Stella’s desires can only ever be conventional. She desires her husband, and the life that she has. But this does not make her any less complex or interesting. We may condemn the choice she makes at the end of the play, but this is 1940s America after all, and so we must also ask whether there is a right choice between her sister and her husband.
Other cast members come and go, loitering around the elevated centre section of the stage – a minimalist representation of Stanley and Stella’s flat. They run, shout and play poker under the technicolour lighting that illuminates the entire stage in those rare, upbeat moments between scenes. Others sing the polka that haunts Blanche, a reminder that the play’s quietest moments are often the most unsettling. In what was one of the most heartbreaking moments, Ferran’s Blanche cries out that, more than anything, she wants a rest. There is, however, to be no rest for Blanche in reality. In fact, from beginning to end, this production did not rest. Not a moment was wasted, and instead, I was left wanting to continue the story, wanting to follow Blanche down the aisle and out of the theatre. It is a cruel irony that the character who most desires an escape from reality must walk through the audience, leaving behind the magic she fails to create. Her fantasies do not survive the duration of the play, but what took place onstage was certainly magical.