Sex and self-loathing in this landmark piece of American theatre
Blanche Dubois’s savaging of Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire (1947)
‘Ithought the play was a certain failure and I was once again certain that I was a dying artist and not even the least bit sure that I was an artist.” So Tennessee Williams wrote in his memoirs, recalling his mood during rehearsals for A Streetcar Named Desire ahead of its Broadway opening in the dying days of 1947.
Given what we know of Streetcar’s phenomenal success – and the way it was swiftly recognised as one of the landmark American plays of the 20th century – that pessimistic assessment now looks about as wide of the mark as it’s possible to get.
Yet despite his breakthrough triumph, aged 34, two years earlier with The Glass Menagerie – the haunting memory play set in his native St Louis and steeped in his melancholy family experiences – Williams’s status was by no means secure. He accelerated work on Streetcar after being discouraged by responses to his draft of Summer and Smoke, wrongly convinced he was dying of pancreatic cancer.
In the winter of 1946, holed up in the French quarter of New Orleans, this restless, itinerant soul would have looked out of his apartment window to see the old streetcar bearing the destination sign “Desire” (a district of the city) rattling along Royal Street. With hindsight, it sounds like the most perfectly beguiling title for a play – but Williams weighed up a host of immemorable other options (including “The Passion of a Moth” and “Go, Said the Bird!”) beforehand.
That instantly evocative tramline is referenced the minute we clap eyes on the heroine, Blanche Dubois. This “daintily dressed” incongruous figure – a woman of “delicate beauty”, to quote Williams’s stage notes – has used Desire to reach the equally symbolicsounding (but no less real avenue) Elysian Fields and what will prove a lonely terminus in her life. Adrift in the world having sold the family ancestral home, Belle Reve (a Southern plantation), this poor former English teacher (disgraced, as we later learn, following a sexual scandal with a 17-year-old) throws herself on the hospitality of her sister Stella and brother-in-law Stanley (Kowalski). It’s a hospitality that shifts into vicious animosity: cooped up in their two-bed apartment, Blanche’s disdainful airs and graces get up the nose of the violently macho factory-parts salesman, building to a devastating climax of rape and psychological disintegration. With a young Marlon Brando making his name as the brooding stud – opposite Jessica Tandy as Blanche – the New York premiere proved a “smash”.
It wasn’t just the poetry, it was the peacockery that changed everything. Gore Vidal hailed Brando’s appearance in a torn sweaty T-shirt as an earthquake. “Before [Stanley Kowalski], no male was considered erotic … A man was essentially a suit, he wasn’t a body.” Stealing away from a party celebrating their success, Williams went on a night-ride through New York with Brando on a new motorbike. John Lahr conjured it: “The greatest actor and the greatest playwright of their era sped around Manhattan, feeling the exhilarating surge of power underneath them.”
The context
At what point do matters between the super-refined interloper and the master of the house take a turn towards an inexorable battle of wills which Blanche – so vulnerable, despite her outward shows of determined decorum – can only lose? I’d say it comes in her unguarded, misguided moment of full-throated disgust at Stanley’s behaviour in scene four, delivered in the wake of him going violently ape the night before at one of his poker games. Stella has explained why she has returned to her husband’s arms. Instead of reading the room, Blanche doubles-down on her prim superior attitude and, failing to notice Stanley coming into the apartment, goes into a snobbish aria.
What’s in the speech?
“He acts like an animal, has an animal’s habits!” she begins, at Stella’s prompting, and starts to embellish her theme, drawing out faults like a magician’s unending handkerchief. “There’s even something – subhuman – something not quite to the stage of humanity yet!” she continues, constructing an anthropological hypothesis of arrested evolution: “Thousands and thousands of years have passed him right by, and there he is – Stanley Kowalski – survivor of the Stone Age!”
The back-stabbing becomes frenziedly gleeful: “Night falls and other apes gather! … His poker night!” Her carefree mockery turns pulpit sermon: “Maybe we are a long way from being made in God’s image, but Stella – my sister – there has been some progress since then! Such things as art – as poetry and music – such kinds of new light have come into the world since then!” Appealing to her, as from the heart of civilisation, she makes a final appeal: “Don’t hang back with the brutes!”
Why is it so powerful?
It’s a moment of hypnotic tragicomedy and a pivotal one. In ostensibly attempting to “save” her sister, Blanche unwittingly damns herself. Without uttering a word, Stanley hereafter resolves to answer her description by what he sees as fittingly bestial means. The speech crystallises the tension in the play between affected (female) refinement and brute (male) honesty. The more glowingly alive Blanche becomes in her denunciation, the more she signals ambiguities about sexuality and desire – her revulsion denotes a counterpoint repressed fascination. This contradiction – apparent to us – stands silently amid all her garrulousness. As Elia Kazan succinctly put it: “Blanche is torn between a desire to preserve her tradition, which is her entity, her being, and her attraction to what is going to destroy her traditions.”
In performance
As you’d expect, the scene is given full subtextual weight in Kazan’s 1951 film, Vivien Leigh introducing a hue of green jealousy into the black-andwhite cinematography as she tries to destroy the marriage. Her Blanche believes in her own earnest charity: eyes widening in concern, frown piously concentrated, hands – however – telltale fluttering to her breast and neck before fervently embracing her sister. At the Donmar in 2009, Rachel Weisz achieved a spot-on brittleness, her assumed self-composure belied by a neurotic air that had an almost pheromonal quality. For a few more days, the NT is streaming Gillian Anderson’s awardwinning turn at the Young Vic in 2014: a model of freewheeling contempt. Her Blanche cavorts around the slow-revolving set, warming to her theme, prompting audience giggles as Ben Foster’s manly Stanley stands by, swallowing the hurt.
Why it matters now
More than 70 years on, Streetcar shows no signs of rust and wear. As long as mankind is subject to violent contradictory impulses, unfulfilled desire and deranging loneliness, the play will be with us. “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers” runs Blanche’s famous exit line, all pitiable gratitude as she’s shuffled away by a mental sanatorium doctor. And we will always depend on the sad wisdom of Williams.