Stay up to date with notifications from The Independent

Notifications can be managed in browser preferences.

A Streetcar named Desire, Lyttelton Theatre, London

A bumpy ride to nowhere

Paul Taylor
Monday 14 October 2002 00:00 BST
Comments

Glenn Close was sensational as Norma Desmond, the superannuated silent screen diva, in Trevor Nunn's Los Angeles production of Sunset Boulevard. Now, in the same director's Lyttelton revival of A Streetcar Named Desire, Close makes her British stage debut in the role of Blanche DuBois, another female symbol of a dying culture who fails to adapt and winds up being led off to the nuthouse. The difference is that Norma's delusions of making a glorious comeback are armour-plated, whereas Tennessee Williams's heroine – the faded Southern belle who is on the run from ruin and sexual scandal – has a pitifully shaky grip on her pretensions to genteel respectability. We know that Close is dab hand at projecting implacable resolve. But is vulnerability within her compass?

On the evidence of her performance here, the answer, I'm afraid, is a pretty emphatic no. With the determined cut of her jib, she comes across as a tough cookie who is engaged in an arch impersonation of Blanche. The ladylike airs on her arrival at her sister's New Orleans apartment are too confidently imperious and jaunty. True, she extracts some good broad comedy from this "visiting royalty" manner, as when she lets out a hilarious shriek of distress at the very idea that she might have to sweep up some broken glass. But while Blanche is, partly, the lodger from hell in a play that is certainly no simple moral fable of beleaguered delicacy destroyed by brutishness, she is also a nervously exhausted woman in desperate search of a last refuge.

Close, however, fails to communicate the painful fragility that lies behind the heroine's compulsive flirtatiousness and deluded poetic flights from reality. Instead of a nervously fluttering, doomed moth, the actress presents you with a figure who, at moments, could be rechristened Cruella DuBois. It's characteristic that in the scene where she steals a kiss from the newspaper boy, the youth's comic discomfiture makes more of an impact than Blanche's desperately sad and embarrassing emotional neediness. The wounded, dreamy romanticism is reduced to slightly ridiculous posturing.

It doesn't help that Close looks more like the well-preserved mother than the haggardly beautiful sister of Stella, whose plump, down-to-earth sensuality is well portrayed by Essie Davis. The miscasting extends to Blanche's great antagonist. Muscled, lean and exquisitely cheekboned, Iain Glen exudes the right kind of sexual cockiness as her brother-in-law Stanley Kowalski, but the sense of primitive animal magnetism and intense physical threat is missing from his insufficiently dangerous performance. The actor can't obliterate his natural sensitivity. There's woefully little erotic tension between this Stanley and Blanche, because the characters aren't properly presented as the kind of polar opposites who attract and repel each other. The onset of the rape is presented here in graphic detail, but the attack does not feel like the violent culmination of some electrically charged and inevitable process or justify Stanley's claim that "We've had this date with each other from the beginning!"

Bunny Christie's monumental tenement set revolves to take us right the way through the Kowalski apartment, even into the much-disputed territory of the bathroom. This mobility proves useful in the well-staged final scene, where the pursuit of Blanche by the doctor and nurse really does resemble the nightmarish hunting down of a stricken animal.

But the lofty airiness of the set does not contrive to create a steamily oppressive atmosphere. The design, with its host of whirling fans, and the blues-singing low-lifers who haunt the surrounding streets, suggest a musical manqué. Inadequate on several fronts, this Streetcar offers a less than enthralling three-hour ride.

To 23 Nov (020-7452 3000). A version of this review appeared in later editions of Wednesday's paper

Join our commenting forum

Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies

Comments

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged inPlease refresh your browser to be logged in