11 February 2025
When I first saw this thrilling production in 2022 at the Almeida Theatre, it quite by accident turned out to be the very first performance after the lead actress playing Blanche DuBois withdrew and Patsy Ferran went on stage with just a few days’ rehearsal and with the script pasted into a small diary she kept in her hand or opened by her side when she sat on the stage. Despite Blanche’s many long speeches, and although she had yet to fully find the character and settle into the role, Patsy rarely consulted it and the evening was a you-had-to-be-there triumph. You could sense the electricity flying in the air between the actors, they all had a glint in their eyes and a look of joint enterprise – they had to get through it together at all costs. They made it to the end with no obvious slip-ups and the audience went absolutely crazy.
I promised myself I would return later in the run but didn’t get the chance – it was a sell out both at the Almeida and in its West End transfer, largely thanks to the inspired casting of Paul Mescal from the BBC’s Covid lockdown hit, Normal People, as brutish, beer-swilling Stanley Kowalski – the role that made Marlon Brando a star in Tennessee Williams’s steamy movie masterpiece.
Now the production is back for a short West End run before transferring Off Broadway to Brooklyn’s BAM Strong Harvey Theater, where it is already a 100% sellout, no doubt thanks in no small part to the film Gladiator II that Mescal beefed up for and shot with Sir Ridley Scott after the initial run of Streetcar . So how is it looking?
First performed on Broadway in 1947, A Streetcar Named Desire can feel like potboiler melodrama. Here, in the hands of director Rebecca Frecknall, in her first work since her revival of Cabaret starring Eddie Redmayne became the toast of the West End, it comes up thrillingly fresh as new paint. Her vision working with designer Madeleine Girling, is to strip back the Kowalski’s claustrophobic two-room apartment in New Orleans to a bare stage and treat it as a gladitorial arena, with the majority of the cast of supporting players sitting on chairs around the edges. At the Almeida it was even more claustrophobic with the audience on three sides. Into this arena sashays Ferran as a faded Southern belle who seeks refuge with her sister Stella (Stanley’s wife). Then Williams lights the blue touch paper…
The acting is top drawer: Mescal is bloody tremendous as Stanley, who suspects Blanche’s motives and history; he’s like a caged, feral animal – never more so than crawling along the floor on all fours in his plush maroon silk pyjamas. He repeatedly strips off in front of Blanche and you can sense the audience collectively stopping breathing. When he finally explodes with (verbal) violence against Blanche and her heavily pregnant sister (the excellent Anjana Vasan) he spits food over their faces and hair. You really don’t know how far his coersive behaviour will go as he appears to have no boundaries, and that is intoxicating and terrifying at the same time.
Ferran is equally sensational, her Blanche flutters about like a delicate butterfly, yet goes in swiftly for the kill when she spies a new sexual victim, her fake Southern affability giving way to steely resolve. She also mines great comedy from Blanche’s consumption of large amounts of liquor in the Deep South heat. She struck gold – and won major awards – previously with the same director at the Almeida with Tennessee Williams’ Summer & Smoke that won her the Best Actress Olivier and the Best Olivier Revival. She was rightly named Best Actress as Blanche at the 2023 Critics Circle Awards.
What I love most about the Almeida Theatre is its intimacy. As an audience member you really feel drawn into the action and that you are breathing the same air as the actors. At that first preview, sitting in the front row, my feet were covered with cubes of ice when one of his drinking buddies threw the contents of an ice box over Kowalski’s back and ice cubes cascaded off the low stage and into the audience. I loved it! Sitting in the third row at the Noël Coward Theatre, with the stage and action elevated high above me, there was sadly a feeling of disconnect from the actors, but that’s my only negative now about one of the finest productions in recent memory.
