The Guardian

Stage review

Intensity restrained, then turned up to 11

Mark Fisher

A Streetcar Named Desire Pitlochry festival theatre ★★★★☆

It must be tempting for an actor playing Blanche DuBois to be unhinged from the start. Once they know the emotional battering the character is about to get – the layers of regret and recrimination made volatile by drink – they would have cause to enter with some hysteria. But Kirsty Stuart is too subtle an actor for that.

As the unsteady centre of Tennessee Williams’s 1947 play, directed here by Elizabeth Newman, she reminds us of the respectable teacher she claims to be. She is not merely dissembling to hide a dissolute lifestyle. This is a woman with intelligence and charm. As she cracks, her declarations of superiority become hollow, but she has enough poise to make you believe her life is not entirely a sham.

This makes her clashes with sister Stella and brother-in-law Stanley Kowalski all the more brittle. On a rotating set by Emily James, its spiral staircase glinting under Jeanine Byrne’s lights that turn everything a brooding copper and green, Nalini Chetty’s Stella is at once plainer and more selfassured than Blanche. She has the charisma of a woman who has got what she wants.

And what she wants, riskily and lustily, is Matthew Trevannion’s Stanley. In a production unafraid to swim into the play’s undercurrent of domestic violence, he is both assertive and troublingly magnetic.

With shaven head and tattoos, he bellows for attention. Stella is his equal but Blanche is wrongfooted by him. Their exchanges are intense, the volume ratcheted up to 11 in a production that comes most alive when any combination of these actors is on stage. Pippa Murphy’s languid jazz score does nothing to quell their passions.

Until 30 September

National

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2023-06-09T07:00:00.0000000Z

2023-06-09T07:00:00.0000000Z

https://guardian.pressreader.com/article/281883007739902

Guardian/Observer