Colliding images of grease-stained tank tops and gowns worn with pearls in Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire encapsulated the tensions within American gender politics in the wake of World War II. This dramatic juxtaposition continues to resonate with a sense of immediacy in Melbourne Theatre Company’s production of the play, directed by Anne-Louise Sarks and with a magnetic performance by Nikki Shiels in the role of Blanche DuBois. Southern belle Blanche arrives in New Orleans to stay with her sister Stella. When Stella’s husband Stanley torments Blanche about her mysterious past, her sanity begins to unravel. It’s a story about a woman pushed to the mental and emotional brink, and the instances of physical and sexual violence and the punishment of indiscreet sexual behaviour sadly still speak to the present.
When Stanley Kowalski strikes his pregnant wife in a drunken rage, it is a false comfort to remind yourself that you’re watching something written nearly 80 years ago. It was, after all, only a few months ago, following media coverage of a string of homicides by intimate partners and rallies across the country against gendered violence, that Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said violence against women constituted a ‘national crisis’. And it was only a few years ago that Grace Tame and Brittany Higgins joined other high-profile women in demanding action from leaders on the treatment and safety of women. Gender politics may have shifted, but we are still the descendants of the 1940s, and the gendered violence of Williams’ classic play still resonates.
Blanche, hiding the fact that she has no money and nowhere else to go, arrives in New Orleans and is soon entangled in the awful relationships of the occupants of Elysian Fields. Blanche’s traditional femininity and Southern refinement fly in the face of Stanley’s working-class roots, controlling nature and rough masculinity. He is threatened by Blanche’s influence over his wife, and is furiously determined to expose the sordid mysteries of Blanche’s past.
Shiels’ Blanche is majestic and sardonic with a seemingly unabashed confidence. Her witty delivery brings an unexpected levity to this traditionally tragic role and her initial composure gives her character credibility as well as easy grace. You trust Shiels’ Blanche and you don’t want to believe Stanley’s allegations. Shiels’ representation of Blanche suggests her insanity is more a symptom of an entrenched refusal to be subjugated to patriarchal control. With her situation calibrated to a more modern — and arguably more common — understanding of contemporary gender dynamics, Blanche is less victim of her own delusions than a casualty of a repressive social order.
In this light, the character and the play become more about the violence women are forced to endure, bringing a topical complexity to this Streetcar. Perhaps what becomes overshadowed in the process are the nuances of Blanche’s character — the vulnerabilities that she covers over with her false propriety and drinking; her anxiety over the status of her beauty and her reliance on the male gaze.
You can’t help but compare it to Lady Olivier’s characterisation of Blanche in the famous 1951 film (Vivien Leigh had already played Blanche on the West End under her husband’s direction) melded her classical stage technique with Marlon Brando’s Stanislavskian method, his Actors Studio intensity, to create an inspired characterisation of desperate vulnerability. Leigh draws the viewer’s sympathy into absolute identification with her tragedy. The childlike bewilderment in her doe-like eyes as they behold the seedy side of New Orleans presages her inevitable descent into madness. With the original Kazan film, you get the sense that Leigh’s Blanche, at the mercy of a powerful male and on the verge of a breakdown, is now a reduced figure and would likely seem outdated to Anne-Louise Sarks.
Blanche is always going to be sacrificed, but where that is inevitable and tragic with Vivien Leigh’s performance, Shiels’ Blanche seems less of a victim and more of a fighter, a portrayal that departs from the fragile woman at the heart of the original play. In place of a delicate flower crushed by a brutal world of men, we are presented with a woman of steely resolve; one of nature’s survivors. When she arrives at the Kowalski’s apartment, Blanche appears to have a firm grip on her sanity and her sharp-tongued self-assurance makes her a more formidable opponent to Stanley than the histrionic Blanche of Vivien Leigh. While this approach might offer a contemporary appeal, it does alter the play’s emotional trajectory. Williams’ Blanche DuBois is a character defined by her fragility, and her descent into madness is a harrowing testament to the pressures of a society that offers little mercy to women. With Blanche now a figure of power and brittle defiance, she lacks the vulnerability which was present in Kazan’s original vision and the logic of her descent into ‘madness’ isn’t as clean-cut. But it ends in tragedy anyway, and Shiels brings her Blanche to fulfilment with a dazzling combination of lunacy and grace.
'Blanche DuBois is a character defined by her fragility, and her descent into madness is a harrowing testament to the pressures of a society that offers little mercy to women. With Blanche now a figure of power and brittle defiance, she lacks the vulnerability which was present in Kazan’s original vision and the logic of her descent into ‘madness’ isn’t as clean-cut.'
Stanley, on the other hand, is a wild, untameable dog of a character, graphically magnetic in Marlon Brando’s performance, brimming with the unbridled masculinity of a bygone era. In contrast, Mark Leonard Winter’s updated Stanley is a more domesticated creature, in a choreographed performance that lacks the feral intensity required — his ‘Stella!’ yelps like a terrier instead of baying like a hound. Brando’s portrayal of brawny and violent masculinity might seem exaggerated even to the point of caricature to a modern audience. And yet, Stanley’s behaviour in investigating Blanche’s past still resonates; consider news stories of stalking and online harassment and the ways technology has been made a tool for violence against women. But Winter’s portrayal makes him unlikely as the wrathful beast. His boyishness works to diminish Stanley’s dominating masculinity (could this child really have served as a master sergeant in WWII?) especially when opposite such a self-assured Blanche.
Although A Streetcar Named Desire is over 75 years old, the text is rich with political undercurrents as relevant to contemporary audiences as they ever were. And Melbourne Theatre Company’s production is a testament to how a director can comb a text to discover unexplored connections to the present. Sarks’ transforming vision ‘updates’ the show by flipping the power dynamics of two leading roles on their heads, while remaining faithful to the structure of the original. Sarks’ interrogation of contemporary gender politics speaks for the dignity of women who, like Blanche, take on abuse and work to counter a masculinity that is much diminished but still perceived as threatening. At the same time, Sarks’ artistic revitalisation of Streetcar is a reminder to audiences of how history is wise to the ways of the present.
Eddie Hampson is a literary and film critic.