“I don’t want realism. I want magic!” Blanche’s famously desperate cry holds the key to most approaches to “A Streetcar Named Desire.” Productions of Tennessee Williams’ masterpiece tend to c…
Williams’s carefully detailed, literal two-room apartment is never shown. Instead, heralding her entire approach, Frecknall opens the play in an expressionist whirlwind of fraught, choreographed action on a bare, raised, in-the-round stage, topped off by a percussionist , who is perched above and intermittently orchestrates and punctuates the proceedings. Only when strictly essential, chairs and props are handed over by actors prowling round the rim of the suitably cramped stage.
That’s embedded in the way everyone speaks. Accents are unusually secure and no-one falls into the phony, languorous “Southern” trap. And with more rapid speech rhythms galvanizing everything, there are huge gains in punch and power. Frecknall harnesses all that to build tension which she paces to perfection. Long-held moments of tension and shock land with real weight because they are so fully earned by the passion that has preceded them.
As in her awards-garlanded “Cabaret,” Frecknall’s trump card is in her casting. Dwayne Walcott’s slightly lumbering Mitch is beautifully tender and hurt, while Anjana Vasan’s Stella makes unusually complete sense of a complex woman, in thrall to the animal magnetism of the man who has released her from her past and keeps her in a highly physicalized present.
His antipathy towards and connection to Blanche charges up the entire evening. Ferran took over the role during rehearsal when the original actor, Lydia Wilson, was injured. Petite and taut, 33-year-old Ferran isn’t typical casting for the self-deceiving Blanche, usually played by an older actor channeling a faded Southern belle. But that image is solely in Blanche’s head. Ferran gives something else entirely.
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