A Streetcar Named Desire
Smock Alley Theatre, Dublin
★★★☆☆
There’s a scene in Tennessee Williams’s sweltering play from 1947 when Blanche DuBois, a visitor who has arrived in New Orleans with a suitcase of costume dresses and love poems, is driven to explanation. Asked about her concealed past, she says: “You know what ‘played out’ is? My youth was suddenly gone up the water spout.”
It’s a line that has possibly held the play back. Among standout performances in Dublin, audiences will recall Frances McDormand giving a tightly controlled, fraught turn in 1998. Lia Williams was luminous as an impossibly refined Blanche in 2013. Both actors were cast in their 40s despite the script describing the character as 30. Within the strict society of the United States in the 1940s, perhaps a woman was made to feel past her prime, but the role has always been tinged with youthful vim.
For this lucid Smock Alley production, Cathal Cleary, its director, has recruited a pleasingly young cast. Eavan Gaffney’s Blanche, after a tumultuous first decade of adulthood, steps inside her sister’s modest apartment, which is far from the high-class comfort of their ancestral home. Stella (Sade Malone) smiles with girlish admiration for her alpha husband, Stanley (Jack Meade) – a couple in their late 20s making a start on a problematic life together.
Where older Blanches hit the rigid poses of high-society women – Williams’s silhouette extended into the pointed shoulders of puff sleeves; in a London production in 2020, Gillian Anderson leaned into the drama of a wide-sleeved but confining kaftan – Gaffney is impressively fluid. “You talk to your mother about me?” she says, suddenly turning on her heel to sit next to an admirer (a wonderfully well-judged Kristian Phillips).
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Gaffney can give unlikely lines propulsion. “Present them to him with a box of aspirin tablets!” she says with a snap when Meade’s watchful Stanley threatens to have a lawyer look over the sale contract for the family home (which he would have a legal claim to as Stella’s husband).
Cleary’s production is fascinatingly exposed, the cramped apartment represented by a minimalist stage surveilled by characters lurking on the edges. The jazz of the Blue Piano saloon becomes replaced by the composer Jack Baxter’s haunting song (“Some hypnotic dream / To lift us”) as Blanche is greeted by smiling, unblinking locals. Such ominous signs foreshadow a cry for help later on: “Caught in a trap!”
This is the production’s preferred tone as Blanche’s mind begins to spiral. As well played as the material is, the promise of a fresh perspective seems overshadowed by productions past, as vocal intonations and costuming veer towards older impersonation.
This isn’t quite a Blanche finally making a start on life after a lost first decade of adulthood (“Death ... the opposite is desire!”), a twentysomething Stella nosediving into experience without a clear safety net (“I was sort of thrilled by it,” she says of her husband’s aggression) or a Stanley making a shocking transition from military to family life. The old streetcar occasionally clatters with life, though.
A Streetcar Named Desire is at Smock Alley Theatre, Dublin, until Saturday, December 21st
