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Barnaby Kay (Mitch) and Rachel Weisz (Blanche) |
Desire and Weisz in steamy New Orleans
A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE
Donmar Warehouse
PEOPLE should not be judged on appearances, but some people make it hard to avoid.
In Rob Ashford’s production of Streetcar, Rachel Weisz looks as sweet as a sugar doll – and it is upsetting.
She plays Blanche DuBois, Tennessee Williams’s most fragile, towering column of contradictions made flesh. Weisz, who is best known as a film actress, is young (in her thirties) and beautiful, but neither of those points are cardinal sins: Vivien Leigh, who starred in the 1951 film opposite Marlon Brando, had looks to spare and Williams’s own directions suggest Blanche is 30 years old.
What rankles is Weisz’s condition. When she appears on the corner of Christopher Oram’s tall, elegant New Orleans set in search of her sister Stella, she might for all the world have just stepped out of an LA spa; the signs of hard living and excess are conspicuously absent. It’s impossible not to think it, yet it is not fair to Weisz’s performance to dwell on it.
As the story unfolds – in the cramped one-bedroom apartment of Stella and her glowering Polish husband, Stanley Kowalski – Weisz proves herself to be a fantastic Blanche.
A faded Southern belle brought to her current low standing by a streetcar named Desire and the “epic fornications” of the DuBois family – particularly, we learn, her own – Blanche arrives as a hangdog aristocrat, sneaking bourbon to steady her nerves.
Her attempts to find a footing are met with suspicion and brute cynicism by the boorish Stanley (Elliot Cowan). Weisz blossoms in this insecure duet, by turns proud and cowed, charming and broken.
It’s a protean performance in a production that shifts from Southern Comfort kisses to summer thunder in the blink of an eye.
Shadows dance on the naked brick, cicadas croak, and smoky jazz drifts in and out of earshot. At moments, the eponymous streetcar rumbles through beyond, the city’s own pathetic fallacy of an impending, unescapable doom.
Relative newcomer Ruth Wilson is superb as Stella, but Cowan as Stanley mistakes bellowing machismo for the ardour of the underdog. His jutting jaw and cornmeal pronunciation almost create a language of their own: “Miami millionaire” comes out as “mow mew”.
Weisz, like Blanche, will have to rely on the kindness of strangers; in her case to look past her appearance and suspend their disbelief.
This production offers magic, not realism, but who, really, can gripe about that?
Until October 3
Call 0844 209 1805 |
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