A Streetcar Named Desire lands with impeccable timing for the MTC. As the nation grapples with the awful toll of gendered violence, what we’re seeing feels anything but dated.
You might think that a play written in 1947 and set in the crowded and steamy streets of New Orleans would have little to say to Australians in 2024. But picture this: at a make-believe apartment inside a large rehearsal space in Melbourne, an awkward seduction is ending badly. Blanche DuBois is trying to extricate herself from the grasp of a gentleman caller, who is missing all her signals.
Given Blanche’s circumstances, Mitch needn’t worry. He might be dull and clumsy but Blanche will cling to him as if to a life raft, and so she reassures him: “You’re a natural gentleman, one of the very few that are left in the world.” A faded southern belle who has been dismissed from the school where she seduced a young man, and brought low by the loss of her family’s estate, Blanche is, as she famously observes, wholly dependent on “the kindness of strangers”.
“I think if you use a word like ‘crazy’ or ‘fragile’, it stops us as an audience having to ask questions about every interaction. It sort of becomes an answer to what’s going on and it also becomes an excuse for the Stanleys and the Mitches.It’s a shift that is coming to life as Shiels climbs what she calls the “mountain” that is Blanche DuBois.
“I’ve been trying to think about who she was as a woman before all of these things happened to her. In some ways, she’s kind of on a loop from her original trauma, which was the death of her young husband.”The suicide of Blanche’s closeted husband, Allan, and her own cruel reaction to finding him having sex with another man, plagues her and is a possible explanation for her subsequent predatory behaviour.
When Shiels was offered the role, she assumed there’d been a mistake – “surely I’m playing Stella?” she thought. Recent productions had cast older women in the role: Gillian Anderson was 45 and Cate Blanchett 40 when they played Blanche. So will a modern audience buy the idea of a 30-something woman being, in the parlance of the day, over the hill? Again, Sarks sees contemporary resonances.
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