@ Festival Theatre, Edinburgh, until Sat 21 Mar 2015
At the time Tennessee Williams was writing, Freud’s theories of psychoanalysis were still relatively new. Williams’ plays look critically at the grief and desires we repress, and how they impact other aspects of our lives. Following a hugely successful tour in 2012, Scottish Ballet revive their production of A Streetcar Named Desire for 2015. The production was Olivier-nominated and winner of Critics Circle and South Bank awards and takes us on a chronological journey from protagonist Blanche DuBois’s grief-stricken youth to her eventual downfall.
Blanche DuBois (Eve Musto) always depends on the kindness of strangers. And still, she finds herself on the doorstep of an apartment in hot New Orleans, visiting her sister, Stella (Sophie Martin) and brother-in-law, Stanley (Erik Cavallari). Suspicious of her past, and the events that have led Blanche to his home, Stanley investigates; meanwhile, Blanche attempts to make a new life for herself.
Williams’ Pulitzer Prize-winning text has been transposed into a visceral dance piece by director Nancy Meckler and choreographer Annabelle Lopez Ochoa. The Scottish Ballet Orchestra plays Peter Salem’s jazz score that journeys in and out of Blanche’s mind and bustling New Orleans. The motifs and metaphors that make Williams’ text so colourful inspire the design, direction and choreography. Niki Turner’s set design is stylised with most set-pieces suggestively built from monochrome crates, and the use of colour through costume and Tim Mitchell’s lighting is careful and deliberate. Musto’s Blanche captures strength and grounded resistance in the character: she is fragile, but she isn’t weak. The smothering heat of the South intensifies the dynamic between the characters and the movement pulls out the instinctive, animalistic forces that drive them. This is a production in which all theatrical tools and devices are sewn together to create a very considered and intense translation of a classic text into dance. It’s an exploration of mind and body, intellect and instinct: the burning and simmering emotions that we suppress will find an out. In a Williams play, that can only lead to chaos.