Reviews for "A Streetcar Named Desire"
1. The Ethel Barrymore Theatre
The New York Times
December 4, 1947
First Night at the Theatre
By BROOKS ATKINSON
Tennessee Williams has brought us a superb drama, "A Streetcar Named Desire," which was acted at the Ethel Barrymore last evening. And Jessica Tandy gives a superb performance as a rueful heroine whose misery Mr. Williams is tenderly recording. This must be one of the most perfect marriages of acting and playwriting. For the acting and playwriting are perfectly blended in a limpid performance, and it is impossible to tell where Miss Tandy begins to give form and warmth to the mood Mr. Williams has created.
Like "The Glass Menagerie," the new play is a quietly woven study of intangibles. But to this observer it shows deeper insight and represents a great step forward toward clarity. And it reveals Mr. Williams as a genuinely poetic playwright whose knowledge of people is honest and thorough and whose sympathy is profoundly human.
"A Streetcar Named Desire" is history of a gently reared Mississippi young woman who invents an artificial world to mask the hideousness of the world she has to inhabit. She comes to live with her sister, who is married to a rough-and-ready mechanic and inhabits two dreary rooms in a squalid neighborhood. Blanche- for that is her name- has delusions of grandeur, talks like an intellectual snob, buoys herself up with gaudy dreams, spends most of her time primping, covers things that are dingy with things that are bright and flees reality.
To her brother-in-law she is an unforgiveable liar. But it is soon apparent to the theatregoer that in Mr. Williams's eyes she is one of the dispossessed whose experience has unfitted her for reality; and although his attitude toward her is merciful, he does not spare her or the playgoer. For the events of "Streetcar" lead to a painful conclusion which he does not try to avoid. Although Blanche cannot face the truth, Mr. Williams does in the most imaginative and perceptive play he has written.
Since he is no literal dramatist and writes in none of the conventional forms, he presents the theatre with many problems. Under Elia Kazan's sensitive but concrete direction, the theatre has solved them admirably. Jo Mielziner has provided a beautifully lighted single setting that lightly sketches the house and the neighborhood. In this shadowy environment the performance is a work of great beauty.
Miss Tandy has a remarkably long part to play. She is hardly ever off the stage, and when she is on stage she is almost constantly talking- chattering, dreaming aloud, wondering, building enchantments out of words. Miss Tandy is a trim, agile actress with a lovely voice and quick intelligence. Her performance is almost incredibly true. For it does seem almost incredibly that she can convey it with so many shades and impulses that are accurate, revealing and true.
The rest of the acting is also of very high quality indeed. Marlon Brando as the quick-tempered, scornful, violent mechanic; Karl Malden as a stupid but wondering suitor; Kim Hunter as the patient though troubled sister- all act only with color and style but with insight.
By the usual Broadway standards, "A Streetcar Named Desire" is too long; not all those words are essential. But Mr. Williams is entitled to his own independence. For he has not forgotten that human beings are the basic subject of art. Out of poetic imagination and ordinary compassion he has spun a poignant and luminous story.
http://partners.nytimes.com/books/00/12/31/specials/williams-streetcar.html
2. Aldwych Theatre
The London Times
October 13, 1949
1. The Ethel Barrymore Theatre
The New York Times
December 4, 1947
First Night at the Theatre
By BROOKS ATKINSON
Tennessee Williams has brought us a superb drama, "A Streetcar Named Desire," which was acted at the Ethel Barrymore last evening. And Jessica Tandy gives a superb performance as a rueful heroine whose misery Mr. Williams is tenderly recording. This must be one of the most perfect marriages of acting and playwriting. For the acting and playwriting are perfectly blended in a limpid performance, and it is impossible to tell where Miss Tandy begins to give form and warmth to the mood Mr. Williams has created.
Like "The Glass Menagerie," the new play is a quietly woven study of intangibles. But to this observer it shows deeper insight and represents a great step forward toward clarity. And it reveals Mr. Williams as a genuinely poetic playwright whose knowledge of people is honest and thorough and whose sympathy is profoundly human.
"A Streetcar Named Desire" is history of a gently reared Mississippi young woman who invents an artificial world to mask the hideousness of the world she has to inhabit. She comes to live with her sister, who is married to a rough-and-ready mechanic and inhabits two dreary rooms in a squalid neighborhood. Blanche- for that is her name- has delusions of grandeur, talks like an intellectual snob, buoys herself up with gaudy dreams, spends most of her time primping, covers things that are dingy with things that are bright and flees reality.
To her brother-in-law she is an unforgiveable liar. But it is soon apparent to the theatregoer that in Mr. Williams's eyes she is one of the dispossessed whose experience has unfitted her for reality; and although his attitude toward her is merciful, he does not spare her or the playgoer. For the events of "Streetcar" lead to a painful conclusion which he does not try to avoid. Although Blanche cannot face the truth, Mr. Williams does in the most imaginative and perceptive play he has written.
Since he is no literal dramatist and writes in none of the conventional forms, he presents the theatre with many problems. Under Elia Kazan's sensitive but concrete direction, the theatre has solved them admirably. Jo Mielziner has provided a beautifully lighted single setting that lightly sketches the house and the neighborhood. In this shadowy environment the performance is a work of great beauty.
Miss Tandy has a remarkably long part to play. She is hardly ever off the stage, and when she is on stage she is almost constantly talking- chattering, dreaming aloud, wondering, building enchantments out of words. Miss Tandy is a trim, agile actress with a lovely voice and quick intelligence. Her performance is almost incredibly true. For it does seem almost incredibly that she can convey it with so many shades and impulses that are accurate, revealing and true.
The rest of the acting is also of very high quality indeed. Marlon Brando as the quick-tempered, scornful, violent mechanic; Karl Malden as a stupid but wondering suitor; Kim Hunter as the patient though troubled sister- all act only with color and style but with insight.
By the usual Broadway standards, "A Streetcar Named Desire" is too long; not all those words are essential. But Mr. Williams is entitled to his own independence. For he has not forgotten that human beings are the basic subject of art. Out of poetic imagination and ordinary compassion he has spun a poignant and luminous story.
http://partners.nytimes.com/books/00/12/31/specials/williams-streetcar.html
2. Aldwych Theatre
The London Times
October 13, 1949
The purpose of this play is to reveal a prostitutes past in her present. Clinging to the last shreads of her beauty, stranded in the New Orleans home of her younger sister's primitive but satisfactory husband. She makes pathetic and absurd pretences to the refinement which is a childhood memory. Only through such pretences can she hope for a husband, a last desperate hope. Almost she succeeds, but her sister's husband has a certain brutal sense of fair play towards his friends. The method f the author comes perilously near to soliloquy with rare interludes of action. Miss Vivien Leigh drifts to ruin on a tide of words may thousands strong. Her performance, considered maerely as a feat of memory is impressive. But the impressiveness of theperformance grows as the violence of the action deeps. All that an eager audience can gather from the first act is that a preposterous lady of leisure has been a loose woman. In the 2nd act there is, quite well written in which Mr. Williams develops the favourite illusion of nearly all dramatist: that hardened prostitutes are capable fo a touching sentimental gesture. In is the 3rd act-good strong "theatre" which comes nearest to justifying the extreme readiness of the audience to be pleased by this famous American play. Mr. Bonar Calleano can be depended on in all the play's crisis. Vibrant with power is his sketch of the husband who beats his wife and is unfaithful to her yet loves her witha primitive passion which is all she asks; and Miss Renee Asherson provides him with the right kind of wife. Together they give Miss Leigh all the help that the author allows them to give. Sir Laurence Olivier directs with a firm hand, setting the play moving faster, they say, than it moves in New York. The is unhappily entails some sacrifice of audibility.
3. The Lyttelton Theatre's Production
The Evening Standard, Nicholas de Jongh, 9 October 2002
The Evening Standard, Nicholas de Jongh, 9 October 2002
This Streetcar still drives you to enjoy one of the last century's great theatrical trips. Williams' play, dismissed by critics at its London premiere in 1949 as squalid, grubby and shoddy, broke new ground in form and content. It's a lament for the lost and non-conformist, the fragile and rootless outsiders in whose ranks stand Blanche, the disgraced schoolteacher and desperate prostitute. At the New Orleans home of her sister Stella, with only illusions left to support her and the seduction of a 17 year old schoolboy to conceal, she ends up raped, rejected and out of her mind. The two-storey tenement where Stella and her husband Stanley live abounds with jazz, black couples and raffish charm... Miss Close's Blanche is at her powerful best when letting go - desperately making up to Robert Pastorelli's stolid neighbour or describing her gay husband's suicide. Her finale is beautiful. She totters off to the asylum, head leaning on the doctor's shoulder and poignantly in fantasy's iron grip.The Guardian, Michael Billington, October 9, 2002 ***** You can see Tennessee Williams's Blanche DuBois in one of two ways: as an embodiment of the poetic spirit destroyed by crude reality or as a southern snob tragically forced to bite the dust. The greatness of Glenn Close's performance in Trevor Nunn's fine revival at the Lyttelton is that it embraces these, and many other, contradictions.Like all first-rate actors, Close takes hair-raising risks; and in the first half, as she arrives to stay with sister Stella in a teeming sector of New Orleans known as Elysian Fields, you can see why she would grate on the nerves of her brother-in-law, Stanley Kowalski.But, having established Blanche as a patronising intruder, Close almost literally strips away the layers of affectation and pretence. And what she shows us is a woman who lies as a protection against solitude and desperation.The trajectory of Close's magnificent performance is to show a woman who finally acknowledges her limitless capacity for self-delusion.To bring out the comedy and the tragedy of Blanche, the fake grandeur and the genuine pain, is a great achievement. But Close is much helped by Nunn's production which turns the play into a tenement symphony and which shows the surrounding life of the quarter as he did with Catfish Row in Porgy and Bess.A great American play about the lies we all need to sustain our precarious existence has been well served. And, even if Iain Glen has a natural grace slightly at odds with Stanley's crude vigour, he brings out the character's ultimate cruelty.The Times, Benedict Nightingale, 9 October 2002 Glenn Close [gave] a performance that was incisive yet passionate, intelligent yet deeply moving.In one corner is Stanley Kowalski; in Iain Glen's fine, fierce performance, not a straightforward yob but a sexually besotted husband who, thanks to his limited imagination and quick temper, sees in Blanche only pretension, folly and a threat to his marriage. In the other is Close's Blanche, who is a lot more than the cracked belle that, starting with Vivien Leigh in the movie, many actresses have made her. Not that Close fails to embrace either the belle or the crackpot. When Blanche teeters nervously into the vividly evoked grot of the French Quarter, wearing a trim white suit, you feel some exotic moth is lost in the monkey house. When she finally puts on a shimmering gown in a deluded effort to regain self-respect, it's as if Miss Havisham has decided actually to wear her wedding cake.But between those points Close also gives us a Blanche who, yes, can be arch, coy, embarrassingly flirtatious, but also has moments of surprising radiance, wry insight, defensive rage, and a pain and a wincing, palpitating desperation that leaves you, too, emotionally flattened. Southern magnolias seldom come as complex as this.But Close couldn't flower if Trevor Nunn's direction hadn't combined with Christie's designs to create so rich a setting. A black woman sings the blues. A chimney sweep pushes a pram complete with brushes. A prostitute propositions a sailor. It could be fussy, but in fact it's liberating. Everywhere there's a hubbub - but above all in Blanche's soul.Daily Mail, Michael Coveney, 9 October 2002 One of the defining plays of the last century has been given one of the defining productions of this at the National by Sir Trevor Nunn.The poetry, jazz and steaminess of Tennessee Williams' New Orleans tragedy has been fully realised in a way I never expected to see. And, like you, I'm very happy with the Marlon Brando movie. That Brando role of Stanley Kowalski, the chippy Polish-American hunk, is taken by our own brilliant, bestial Iain Glen, last seen on stage partnering Nicole Kidman in The Blue Room. This Polish-American bruiser seduces his wife's sister, the flaky alcoholic Blanche Dubois, in one of the most disturbing rape scenes ever written. And going to pieces as Blanche proves Glenn Close's finest hour as an actress... Miss Close will be the best Blanche of our time. I've seen many fine actresses in the role, from Sheila Gish to Jessica Lange, but no-one has managed the combination of genteel disintegration, skewed sexiness and gleaming vulnerability so well. She leans from the hips like an anglepoise lamp as one of life's truly remarkable second-rate divas... Williams gives us so much colour and poetry as a dramatist, always requiring sympathy for the shopsoiled, the beaten, the drifting. He writes like an angel with a dirty face. Kowalski's charged, violent marriage to Blanche's sister Stella (superbly played by Australian actress Essie Davis) is unparalleled still in modern drama. And Sir Trevor's production, opening up the suffocating proximity of the play with a new momentum on a stunning, revolving design by Bunny Christie, does this masterpiece a real favour of poetic realisation.A Streetcar Named Desire finished on: 23 November 2002
4. Review of The Roundabout Theatre
Broadway Theatre Review by Matthew Murray - April 26, 2005
http://www.talkinbroadway.com/world/Streetcar2005.html
There are as many facets to the city of New Orleans as there are to most Tennessee Williams plays, but one they undeniably share is heat. For Williams, feelings - spiritual or sexual, freely expressed or repressed enough to burn one alive (usually the latter) - were frequently the order of the day. And never was that more the case than in his landmark, New Orleans-set 1947 play now being revived by the Roundabout Theatre Company at Studio 54, A Streetcar Named.What, you were expecting desire? In that case, you should look elsewhere - neither that nor most basic human emotions have any place in Edward Hall's efficient but lifeless production. It attempts to take a piece plagued with almost mythic preconceptions and spin it in a whole new direction; what happens instead is that the deceptively fragile play spirals helplessly out of control, with its director and cast unable to stop it.Blame this, if you must, on the play's fiery 1951 movie version, which has hovered like a specter over more than five decades of the show's history. The film, which united Broadway leads Marlon Brando, Kim Hunter, and Karl Malden with the vivifying presence of Vivien Leigh (replacing original lady Jessica Tandy as the perennially preoccupied Blanche DuBois), is one of the most revered of all stage-to-film translations, something that's imbued pursuers of the stage Streetcar with both hope ("Look how great it can be") and despair ("It will never be that good again").Both feelings are accurate: No stage production is likely to match the untamed, dangerous sexual energy of the film, or the fierce battles it depicts between the high-bred-but-falling Blanche and her nowhere-to-go-but-up brother-in-law, Stanley Kowalski. But even so, any new mounting can succeed on its own terms as long as it's true to the material and its own unique convictions. If it will never be the movie, it will at least be Streetcar.That never proves to be the case here. Hall's production hits all the notes in Williams's dissonant symphony about the human spirit, but makes no real music of its own. Like Blanche, who habitually turns off or modifies the shading of lamps to control the perception of her vanishing youth, Hall is more obsessed with appearance than substance. We get, therefore, a creepy representative tenement set (the work of Robert Brill) that emphasizes the disconnect between what goes on inside and what transpires in the real world, and carefully focused lights (from Donald Holder) that always know just what to obscure in shadow and what to reveal clearly.The play's characters are never illuminated quite as well. This production's Blanche, Natasha Richardson, is hearty and robust from her first moments onstage; Richardson gives fine line readings, but never appears lost at sea in a world she's can't adapt to, and never believably captures the soul of a woman who knows her best days are behind her. Whether playing with lights or sparking a dalliance with a young newspaper collector (the too-mature Will Toale), Richardson's Blanche never actually seems to be dwelling in a world of her own crippling creation.But those illusions are critical; Blanche has little else. She's departed from her English teaching job under somewhat mysterious circumstances to live with her sister Stella (Amy Ryan) and her husband Stanley (John C. Reilly). Blanche's attempts to recapture and glorify the past are distinctly at odds with Stanley's down-to-earth sensibilities (which involve, among other things, rowdy poker games), and even threaten to spoil a possibly healthy relationship with Stanley's Army buddy Mitch (Chris Bauer), who gets dragged into Blanche's web of deceit.If Richardson's head is never sufficiently in the clouds, Ryan and Bauer give appropriately grounded performances that come closest to matching their roles' requirements. Ryan is thoughtful, even mature, and makes Stella a devoted maternal figure for Blanche, and a respite from Stanley's brutishness; Bauer begins strong and slowly collapses, emotionally and physically, as Blanche's constant consternation pushes him to the brink and beyond.It's Reilly, however, who best typifies this Streetcar. In appearance, manner, and voice, he's as far removed from Brando as is imaginable, every bit the Neanderthal Blanche decries him as. (At one point, he stands clutching a radio as though it's a boulder he's about to use to kill his prey. Which isn't that far off the mark.) But for Reilly, Stanley is first and foremost a tired businessman, the kind likely to snap if he's interrupted while reading the paper after a tough day at work, and who has no real interest in sex.Thus, Stanley's chemistry with Stella is perfunctory, his stated desire to make noisy love to her (impossible with Blanche around) only a tacit promise and not an urgent need. His distaste for Blanche and her retreats into fantasy register as equally passionless, and are portrayed by Reilly as only mild (if loud) annoyance. This smothers the story's raging fires, and renders the titanic Blanche-Stanley clashes of wills inconsequential; their confrontations are pallid, and they result in the least convincing sexual assault scene I've ever seen onstage.This production more effectively relates to its material than did two other recent Williams offerings on Broadway, The Glass Menagerie this season and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof last year. But as cast and played, this production has less in common with Williams than The Honeymooners, though Reilly, in addition to being no Marlon Brando, is no Jackie Gleason. Still, it's easy to imagine his Ralph Kramden-like Stanley bellowing, "To the moon, Blanche!" That would be welcome - it would mean that something about this A Streetcar Named Desire could get off the ground.Broadway Theatre Review by Matthew Murray - April 26, 2005
4. Review of The Roundabout Theatre
Broadway Theatre Review by Matthew Murray - April 26, 2005
http://www.talkinbroadway.com/world/Streetcar2005.html
There are as many facets to the city of New Orleans as there are to most Tennessee Williams plays, but one they undeniably share is heat. For Williams, feelings - spiritual or sexual, freely expressed or repressed enough to burn one alive (usually the latter) - were frequently the order of the day. And never was that more the case than in his landmark, New Orleans-set 1947 play now being revived by the Roundabout Theatre Company at Studio 54, A Streetcar Named.What, you were expecting desire? In that case, you should look elsewhere - neither that nor most basic human emotions have any place in Edward Hall's efficient but lifeless production. It attempts to take a piece plagued with almost mythic preconceptions and spin it in a whole new direction; what happens instead is that the deceptively fragile play spirals helplessly out of control, with its director and cast unable to stop it.Blame this, if you must, on the play's fiery 1951 movie version, which has hovered like a specter over more than five decades of the show's history. The film, which united Broadway leads Marlon Brando, Kim Hunter, and Karl Malden with the vivifying presence of Vivien Leigh (replacing original lady Jessica Tandy as the perennially preoccupied Blanche DuBois), is one of the most revered of all stage-to-film translations, something that's imbued pursuers of the stage Streetcar with both hope ("Look how great it can be") and despair ("It will never be that good again").Both feelings are accurate: No stage production is likely to match the untamed, dangerous sexual energy of the film, or the fierce battles it depicts between the high-bred-but-falling Blanche and her nowhere-to-go-but-up brother-in-law, Stanley Kowalski. But even so, any new mounting can succeed on its own terms as long as it's true to the material and its own unique convictions. If it will never be the movie, it will at least be Streetcar.That never proves to be the case here. Hall's production hits all the notes in Williams's dissonant symphony about the human spirit, but makes no real music of its own. Like Blanche, who habitually turns off or modifies the shading of lamps to control the perception of her vanishing youth, Hall is more obsessed with appearance than substance. We get, therefore, a creepy representative tenement set (the work of Robert Brill) that emphasizes the disconnect between what goes on inside and what transpires in the real world, and carefully focused lights (from Donald Holder) that always know just what to obscure in shadow and what to reveal clearly.The play's characters are never illuminated quite as well. This production's Blanche, Natasha Richardson, is hearty and robust from her first moments onstage; Richardson gives fine line readings, but never appears lost at sea in a world she's can't adapt to, and never believably captures the soul of a woman who knows her best days are behind her. Whether playing with lights or sparking a dalliance with a young newspaper collector (the too-mature Will Toale), Richardson's Blanche never actually seems to be dwelling in a world of her own crippling creation.But those illusions are critical; Blanche has little else. She's departed from her English teaching job under somewhat mysterious circumstances to live with her sister Stella (Amy Ryan) and her husband Stanley (John C. Reilly). Blanche's attempts to recapture and glorify the past are distinctly at odds with Stanley's down-to-earth sensibilities (which involve, among other things, rowdy poker games), and even threaten to spoil a possibly healthy relationship with Stanley's Army buddy Mitch (Chris Bauer), who gets dragged into Blanche's web of deceit.If Richardson's head is never sufficiently in the clouds, Ryan and Bauer give appropriately grounded performances that come closest to matching their roles' requirements. Ryan is thoughtful, even mature, and makes Stella a devoted maternal figure for Blanche, and a respite from Stanley's brutishness; Bauer begins strong and slowly collapses, emotionally and physically, as Blanche's constant consternation pushes him to the brink and beyond.It's Reilly, however, who best typifies this Streetcar. In appearance, manner, and voice, he's as far removed from Brando as is imaginable, every bit the Neanderthal Blanche decries him as. (At one point, he stands clutching a radio as though it's a boulder he's about to use to kill his prey. Which isn't that far off the mark.) But for Reilly, Stanley is first and foremost a tired businessman, the kind likely to snap if he's interrupted while reading the paper after a tough day at work, and who has no real interest in sex.Thus, Stanley's chemistry with Stella is perfunctory, his stated desire to make noisy love to her (impossible with Blanche around) only a tacit promise and not an urgent need. His distaste for Blanche and her retreats into fantasy register as equally passionless, and are portrayed by Reilly as only mild (if loud) annoyance. This smothers the story's raging fires, and renders the titanic Blanche-Stanley clashes of wills inconsequential; their confrontations are pallid, and they result in the least convincing sexual assault scene I've ever seen onstage.This production more effectively relates to its material than did two other recent Williams offerings on Broadway, The Glass Menagerie this season and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof last year. But as cast and played, this production has less in common with Williams than The Honeymooners, though Reilly, in addition to being no Marlon Brando, is no Jackie Gleason. Still, it's easy to imagine his Ralph Kramden-like Stanley bellowing, "To the moon, Blanche!" That would be welcome - it would mean that something about this A Streetcar Named Desire could get off the ground.Broadway Theatre Review by Matthew Murray - April 26, 2005
5.
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