This is a great ‘Streetcar’!

Cate Blanchett and Joel Edgerton give great performances in two of the most prized roles in theatre. They embody their roles that counterpoint each other; Blanche’s extreme fragility and desperation, Stanley’s raw confidence and aggressiveness. Robin McLeavy plays Blanche’s distressed Stella caught in the vicious crossfire of an almighty personality clash. The pick of a strong supporting cast was Tim Richards as poker play Mitch, who is also caught in the Stanley/Blanche crossfire, and ends up an emotional mess.

Production values were exemplary; Ralph Myers brilliant set, Tess Schofield’s apt period costumes, Nick Schlieper’s incandescent lighting design, and Paul Charlier’s haunting soundscape, together with Alan John’s piano.

In the STC’s theatre program, there is an extract from a letter that Williams wrote to Elia Kazan before Kazan mounted his famous production, Williams wrote that ‘Streetcar’ is a play about characters misinterpreting each other. “With the distortions in our own egos, and the corresponding distortions in the egos of others, one sees how cloudy the glass becomes through which we look at each other”.

Williams continued, “Stanley sees Blanche not as a desperate, driven creature backed into a last corner to make a last desperate stand- but as a calculating bitch with ’round heels’. It is a misunderstanding, and not Stanley himself, that destroys Blanche in the end”.

The biggest accolade goes to director Liv Ullmann for directing this ‘Streetcar’ according to the letter! The performances, the music, everything in this production, is about the tragedy of people not bothering to learn about each other. Or as Harper Lee wrote in another literary masterpiece, ‘To Kill A Mockingbird’:- ‘to crawl inside a person’s skin and walk around a while’.

Liv Ullmann’s production of ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’ plays the Sydney Theatre until October 17. The production then tours to America where it will play in the John F Kennedy Centre for the Performing Arts in Washington and the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York where it will close on December 20.