Introducing: A Streetcar Named Desire

 Last week, we announced the showing a delayed broadcast of A Streetcar Named Desire, on Sunday 19th October. The live production has already become the fastest selling show in Young Vic's history, with some great promises to be a fantastic show. Holly Williams from the Independent gives us an idea of the collaboration of this freshend-up  historic masterpiece.

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By Holly Williams

Australian stage director Benedict Andrews certainly likes to put a new spin on the classics. But with his latest venture, he is quite literally putting a new spin on things: his take on Tennessee Williams’s 1947 play A Streetcar Named Desire at the Young Vic is being staged in the round, and on a revolve that doesn’t stop revolving. Throw in a starry cast – the redoubtable Gillian Anderson as the fading southern belle Blanche DuBois, rising British actress Vanessa Kirby as her sister Stella and Hollywood star Ben Foster as Stella’s violent husband Stanley Kowalski – and it’s no wonder this is the most anticipated production of the London summer. 

Andrews has directed Streetcar before – in Berlin in 2009, translated into German, and also with a spinning stage. Why return to it? “I love this play almost more than any other,” he explains. But it was also, well, because he was asked to: Anderson had long wanted to play Blanche, and had seen his previous British productions – surreal German drama Gross und Klein with Cate Blanchett and that exhilarating Three Sisters, both in 2012. “There was something about the immediacy and the truth in his interpretations that resonated with me,” she says.

Gillian Anderson and Vanessa Kirby in rehearsal with Andrews

This time, Andrews is dealing with Williams’s poetic language in its original form – in German, it was “much uglier” he concedes – while, unlike in Berlin, all the props mentioned in the text will appear on stage. But he is determined not to treat it as a museum piece. All the Streetcars he’s seen tricked out in lavish period detail have been dead, he says: less realistic than twee, bogged down in a fetishised, romantic view of 1940s New Orleans. “It makes the play genteel: nice quaint people from the past with nice quaint problems. It betrays the play – which was considered shocking at the time – they’re raw people, raw situations.”  

While Andrews luxuriates in Williams’s lyricism – “I’ve fallen in love with the song of it” – he also wants to bring out the violence that underpins it, “the drive of desire, writhing away under everything. From the moment Stanley and Blanche lock eyes, they lock into this destructive, sexual dance of death.”

So, how is the sexual chemistry in the rehearsal room? “Sparks are flying …” he begins mischievously, “in a good way! There’s a sense of camaraderie, they’re pushing each other.”
 It sounds like he pushes them, too. “He demands bold choices,” says Kirby. “I thought Stella was a grounded, earthy person, and then all these demons came up – she’s a sex-and-love addict, actually.” “You just let go, and fall into his embrace of the project,” says Anderson. “He’s a perfectionist, but he’s also a conductor – he sees it musically, he scores the drama.”

Andrews has several justifications, in fact, for the turning stage. It amplifies Blanche’s inexorable downward spiral into madness and, more simply, how her whole world is set spinning, but it also invites the audience into a voyeuristic relationship: when a door tracks past, it may block your view momentarily, reminding you of your own desire to see, to snoop.

Radical stagings of classics always anger some audience members and there’s a certain type of critic who loathes Andrews’ work, too, dismissing it as wilfully interventionist, novelty-seeking “director’s theatre”. But for others, Andrews excels in providing fresh journeys into the core of great plays.
Anderson is obviously in the fan camp: “Everything makes sense in his productions – there’s nothing gratuitous. We are bringing out the simplicity and truth of what Tennessee Williams has written. ”


You can read the full article here
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