Blanche DuBois is the fragile heart of Tennessee Williams’ 1947 masterpiece A Streetcar Named Desire and the easiest character in the Western canon to do an impression of. Chuck on some pearls, a white debutante-like fit and throw back a whiskey before you try your hand at a Southern drawl and you’ve got her, or at least some of her.
If a classic, as the Italian writer Italo Calvino once defined, is a text that ‘has never finished saying what it has to say’ then Williams’ DuBois says more eighty years on with a string of pearls and a Mississippi accent than most of our classics ever could.
Such is the enduring power of Williams’ poetic realism, and the reason why this superficial revival from Melbourne Theatre Company feels so frustrating: for all the expectations or stereotypes we might have going in, the best productions and performances of this theatrical classic will rise above them all. A few sterling performances and technically impressive design cannot erase the fact that this production simply doesn’t know what William’s classic isn’t finished telling us.
Nikki Shiels is our Blanche, entering with a cat-like elegance in a long sheer dress and her iconic mop of curls. She truly is one of our best, commanding the stage with an ease and charisma few could replicate. Impressive vocal acrobatics (and an equally impressive Mississippi accent) show her signalling the complex play of insecurity and entitlement that defines Blanche with quick movements between her crystalline head voice and deep bass. She is the coquettish debutante in one moment, anxious and fragile, and a commanding force to be reckoned with in the other.
Ultimately Shiels plays Blanche with less fragility than you might expect. Her insecurities boast a live-wire unpredictability and confidence that feels closer to Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf’s Martha (playing up the road at the Comedy Theatre). Blanche is usually a bit pathetic, part of her tragedy being her dedication to masking deep-seated insecurities and personal failings with an elitist’s love of fine silk, privacy and whiskey. But Shiel’s Blanche feels ultimately extremely capable, like a royal unfairly plucked from her position. She’s less the sensitive foal barely hiding her fragility behind an overly theatrical confidence, than the queenly Southern Belle forced to mute that confidence so that the men around her don’t feel insecure. In a show where the women are often vulnerable to brutish and over empowered men, this subversion is interesting and key to director Anne-Louise Sark’s read on the classic show.
Many of the women, for instance, tower over their male cast mates. Stanley (Mark Leonard Winter), that tome of overindulged machismo, seems tiny next to Shiels. Winter’s screams for “Stella!” crack and falter like a prepubescent boy. He boasts the pathetic fragility you might expect from Blanche with less of the charisma (played sensitively by Winter). The upstairs neighbour Eunice (Katherine Tonkin) also towers over her husband, offering an intriguing subversion to the power dynamic of their abusive relationship. You almost wish Michelle Lim Davidson’s Stella was given similar opportunities to subvert her dynamic with Stanley.
But these ideas are introduced in act one and quickly forgotten in act two, an act that instead favours cliched design gimmicks and bewildering directorial choices. There are few tropes of main stage theatre more boring than that of dropping confetti from the ceiling. In this production it’s rose petals for some reason, falling from the sky just as Blanche descends deeper into psychosis. If it was intended to evoke the magical delusions Blanche starts seeing around her, the show should’ve kept her on stage to witness it rather than suddenly black out.
By the same token, the introduction of a sudden ghostly phantasm in basic funeral garb wandering the stage is a too-literal representation of Blanche’s delusions. Seeing the figure attempt to retain their ghostliness while they open and close doors and curtains wandering the two-tier revolving apartment complex was only comical.
It’s clear that this production is unsure what to do with its set, a frustratingly nondescript building with none of the script’s rich and detailed rendering of New Orleans’ French Quarter. A musical interlude (The Cure’s ‘Lovesong’ beautifully performed by Gabriella Barbagallo) and random tableaux of queer relationships on the second floor have only the most tangential relationship to the story. Costumes, too, are unhelpfully hammy and all-too explicit. Stanley’s bright gold silk pyjamas and bowling shirt feel pulled from an amateur production of Grease, while Stella’s bright costumes feel too bright and immaculate for her class, not to mention the humidity, sweat and dirt so important to Williams’ world-building.
By the end of act two, Shiels is backed into a corner trying to land Blanche’s tragic conclusion. But it’s too late. The magic of her character is muted and the complexity of this eighty-year old masterpiece doesn’t quite shine through.