Streetcar Revisited
October 23, 2009
For some reason, the news that the Sydney Theatre Company was doing ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’ had passed me by. I found myself reading about how good it ‘had’ been and I felt instant dismay – how could I have been so stupid? One of my favourite plays – and Blanchett as Blanche – how perfect!
She is just about the right age, and all that fairness and perfect, transparent skin finally put to good use – echoing the pale, southern-belle complexion that Blanche would have fought to maintain beneath hats shielding her from the Mississippi sun, and later by skulking in the Hotel Flamingo in the afternoons, avoiding the light of day. Damn! But then, as if by magic, an email pops up ‘Last chance to see Streetcar’ – tickets for the last night, for which you pay a premium (donation to the STC) but get free champagne and an invite to the cast party – dress ‘black and white glamour’ – sold.
I’d never actually seen a live performance of the play before, but the reason it was so close to my heart was I’d played Blanche, 22 years before, when I was at uni. Obviously I’d been too young for the part, and I remember they spent hours making me up to look pretty much as I do today. I was also too young in an emotional sense; some of the moods and nuances expressed baffled me at the time, and I repeated some of the lines like an automaton. Watching it this time, I realised that 22 years has allowed me to witness or experience despair, denial, self-loathing, snobbery, jealousy, rejection, alcoholism, domestic violence, sexual chess, failure, ageing, and deep sensuality – not to mention the sensation of eyeing a young man longingly, before reminding myself that I’m old enough to be his mother.
So, how was it, with all that life behind me and an intimate knowledge of the lines to boot? Was I not tempted to leap onto the stage and shove Cate off with ‘no no, you’ve got it all wrong, let me show you’? As if! Needless to say her performance was excellent – very wide-ranging, thorough, as we’ve come to expect – and Jason Blake in the SMH agrees with me. The play is full of brilliant, camp humour, and she really brought this to the fore – her hypocrisy over drinking ‘I rarely touch a drop’, and her performance of the ‘ape’ speech brought the house down. Teetering and lapsing into hysteria, she lurched through the play, on the brink, foreshadowing the inevitable collapse.
My only criticism would be that she was a little too real. Her physique and demeanour make Blanchett a very strong presence – it is difficult for her to convey the brittle, fragility of Blanche, and the fairy dust she sprinkled constantly ‘Like an orchard in spring, you can remember me by that if you care’, ‘a paper moon sailing over a cardboard sea,’, her fur stole and her rhinestone tiara, the dimmed lights - to create the make-believe world into which she finally retreats. Blanchett strode rather than flitted around the set, and resorted to appearing insane, with violently shaking hands, in the final scenes. Blanche was the ultimate drama queen and actress, and even in extremis, wouldn’t she have retained some of that southern belle composure? Rather than clinging to the doctor who’s come to lock her up, wouldn’t she have taken his arm demurely, and looked up at him, a little coquettishly, her head on one side? Wasn’t the tragedy for Blanche that she wasn’t mad – deranged by circumstances – ‘deluded’ as she had been in her marriage? Wasn’t she the classic butterfly broken on the wheel of macho dominated culture – raped and subdued, put away, reflecting the harsh treatment of homosexuals that echoes through the play, and to which Williams was referring? Seeing Blanche as ‘mad’ is a bit like seeing homosexuals as ‘unnatural’.
I was also a little disappointed with the messenger boy scene – a young messenger enters and a slightly (as always) inebriated Blanche struggles with herself not to seduce him. (Interesting that Blanchett also played Sheba in ‘Notes on a scandal’, the story of the teacher who was exposed and fired for having an affair with a student, as was Blanche). There is a great lilting lyricism in the southern language – it rises and falls very musically, and I felt they could have enjoyed it more. In this scene, she quizzes him ‘and [you] stopped into a drug store? And had a soda? Chocolate? ‘ ‘No, ma’am, cherry’ ‘Mmmmm…Cherry!’. In the film, Vivien Leigh managed to inject so much into ‘cherry’. However, what comes across in Blanchett’s interpretation is the very sordid nature of this scene, and the depths to which Blanche has stooped – and perhaps Cate was right not to make light of that.
And I agree with Peter Cross - where was New Orleans? There was little sense, other than that stated, of the overwhelming heat – ‘100 on the nose and she’s soaking in hot tub’. I remember seeing a play about fisherman once, and the director had insisted on putting a lot of fresh sardines on the radiators before the audience entered, so that the whole theatre would smell of fish to set the scene. A little extreme perhaps, but we could have done with a bit of Cajun spicy chicken.
At the party afterwards, they projected the black and white movie onto the wall, without sound. Vivien Leigh and Marlon Brando were almost impossible acts to follow. Part of Leigh’s brilliance was perhaps that she was Blanche – even so far as her own mental condition causing her to resort to the ‘kindness of strangers’ as it took hold. It’s a brave move for a Sydney company to take an American play on tour in the US, but just as the yanks have conceded that Australian leading actors are more than worthy of the Hollywood red carpet, so I think they will respect this tribute to one of their greatest and most disturbing masterpieces.
