A Streetcar Named Desire review: Tennessee Williams's masterpiece becomes an absorbing psychodrama

This revival of Williams's play about a woman visiting her sister shows the horrors of domestic abuse. Photo: Johnny Frazer

Lyric Theatre, Belfast 

★ ★ ★ ★

“I want you to look at my figure!” says Blanche DuBois, reunited with her sister Stella in a cramped New Orleans apartment. By virtue of appearing in a Tennessee Williams play, Blanche must be referred to as a Southern Belle.

The description might recall the delicate fragility and neurotic flights of Vivian Leigh. But in Aoibheann McCann’s skilled performance, we glimpse the self-possession and wit of an assertive woman. Imagine less Leigh and more Katherine Hepburn. “I want you to look at my figure!” she commands, miraculously charming. 

That gives Williams’s 1947 masterpiece, revived by the Lyric Theatre, some new energy. When Blanche arrives to reveal that their ancestral home has been lost, no one takes it more angrily than Stella’s husband Stanley (Mark Huberman). The law of the day says it’s his to inherit.  

It’s touching that this authoritative Blanche, when witness to Stanley’s shocking attacks against her sister, has a stronger voice. Yet, most stirring is Meghan Tyler’s Stella, who, when the smoke clears, sadly reverts to her amicable self as if nothing had happened. This is the brutal desire that shames and silences, repeating in cycles of conflict and reconciliation.

Director Emma Jordan’s absorbing production is committed to showing the horror of domestic abuse. Even the stair-landing stretching far across Ciaran Bagnall’s apartment set seems here just to allow a mauled neighbour to flee and return to her husband (Abigail McGibbon and Sean Kearns). In all of this, Huberman’s Stanley is conniving rather than animalistic, trying to isolate Stella from her sister. His macho gestures are vindictive, as if the patriarchy were more vengeful than ever. 

Most surprising is how subtly McCann allows Blanche’s struggles with mental illness to come to the surface. When Jordan meets her there, it’s with the bold colours and disorientating sonics of a psychodrama. Carl Kennedy’s sound design is interruptive and unexpected. Bagnall makes the stage as orange as a Berlin techno club. It all somehow sticks.

Unlike the Gate Theatre’s current production of Williams’s The Glass Menagerie, which relies on the veteran Samantha Bond, this Streetcar is a work of fresh perspectives. If Blanche’s muted hysteria is one of them, then it mightn’t be possible for McCann to deliver her final breakdown with the expected pathos. But that’s okay for a character sometimes remembered more as a headcase, and less as her sister’s ally. 

Until Jun 8th.