Tonight, A Streetcar Named Desire officially opens at the Almeida Theatre in London. Much of the pre-publicity hype has surrounded the casting, as Stanley, of Paul Mescal, star of TV’s Normal People and last year’s slow-burning cinematic hit Aftersun. “Phwoar” seems to have been the general response, and why not? Sex sells, and the fame of Tennessee Williams’s 1947 play has always hinged on the sultry tensions between the rough-hewn Stanley and the moth-like Southern belle Blanche DuBois, immortalised in the public imagination by a hulking Marlon Brando and a fragile Vivien Leigh in Elia Kazan’s 1951 film.
The early froth-mouthed reactions to Streetcar have proved hard to shake. Its British premiere caused questions to be raised in Parliament; the Public Morality Council (long defunct) described it as “salacious and pornographic”. I know times have changed, that our perceptions of what is pornographic are radically different; yet while A Streetcar Named Desire is an unequivocally sexy play, I don’t think Williams’s work is primarily about sex – it’s much more about class.
I was reminded of this recently when I watched the Kazan film, true to its theatrical roots in many ways and significantly different in others. What struck me is the lack of any physical intimacy between Leigh and Brando: indeed, the only snog I can remember comes when Blanche kisses a nervous young man who has come to collect the newspaper money. Rather, their poisonous, twisted relationship is based on the fact that Stanley hates the prissy airs and graces of Blanche (his sister-in-law), but conversely feels bound to her because he thinks she’s his meal ticket out of blue-collar misery. In fact, the flake has mismanaged the family inheritance – and the ancestral pile is now worthless.
It must be remembered that the film cut the notorious rape scene short, but in any case I don’t think this horrendous moment is the consequence of an explosion of sublimated desire on Stanley’s part. Rather, sex in its ugliest, most screwed-up form shows the peak of his resentment, a violent reaction to the fact that he’s now almost certainly confined to a life of poverty.
We tend to paint Williams in broad brushstrokes, as not only a purveyor of Southern sexiness, but also a writer with melodramatic tendencies who is therefore inferior to such mid-20th-century giants as Eugene O’Neill and Arthur Miller. It is true that Williams has a liking for moments of unsubtle resonance – a thunderclap during an emotionally fraught monologue, for example – but he is also clever. Directors these days relish that psychological smartness: Rebecca Frecknall’s superb 2018 revival of Williams’s Summer and Smoke, also at the Almeida, brought to the fore the unbearably painful neurosis of its lead character, the singing teacher Alma.
Yet I’m not sure so many people realise that Williams offered acute social and political commentary. There is his autobiographical sympathy for the déclassé, epitomised in his break-out hit The Glass Menagerie (1944) and his aliveness to the sinister bleakness which pervaded 1950s America (such as the McCarthy witch-hunts), a nation which he describes in Camino Real (1953): “Turn back, traveller, for the spring of humanity has gone dry in this place.”
He can also be incredibly funny. On a basic level, I adore Blanche and Stanley bickering about star signs in Streetcar. She, born on September 16, proudly declares “Virgo is for virgin”, and you can imagine the ungallant response of Stanley, a goatish Capricorn. I also love the high camp of the alcoholic former movie star Alexandra del Lago in Sweet Bird of Youth and, best of all, the petty snobberies of Maggie in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, who regards with disdain the abundant fertility of Gooper and Mae and their resultant brood of “no-neck monsters”: “I said to your charming sister-in-law, Mae, honey, couldn’t you feed those precious little things at a separate table with an oilcloth cover? They make such a mess, an’ the lace cloth looks so pretty!”
Of course, Williams, like his favourite playwright Chekhov, knew well the fine line between comedy and tragedy. Maggie’s snottiness about Mae’s fecundity is rooted in the fact that she and her husband Brick (gay, repressed, alcoholic) are childless. The hilariously bitchy swipes at Alexandra – “your gold hair was wreathed with laurel, but the gold is thinning and the laurel has withered. Face it – pitiful monster” – end up making you cry real tears.
Williams probably shed few tears himself. There is evidence to suggest he found much mirth in the tragic: he was often in fits of giggles during the rehearsals of Streetcar when poor Blanche was carted off to the asylum. Apparently he was once asked to leave a London performance of The Glass Menagerie because his profound laughter was freaking out the audience.
Aside from how it handles the cliché of sexiness, the big test in the Almeida’s Streetcar will be the portrayal of Blanche: Patsy Ferran was so good in Summer and Smoke, and now steps in for Lydia Wilson, who withdrew from the production last month for health reasons. I remember a wonderful radio production with the late Glenne Headly, in which her Blanche, far from being a nymphomaniac and sexual neurotic (not my words, but those of the Sunday Express circa 1951), totally outwitted the dim Stanley. Recently, I came across a reference to that production in which the writer noted a visit to Britain by Williams in the late 1970s, where he said that Blanche would have escaped the asylum in 20 minutes because she would have run rings around everyone there.
This, to me, summed up how we have got Williams all wrong. We think he’s a crude manipulator who trades in a sort of larger-than-life dramatic hysteria. Actually, he’s always one step ahead of us.
Tennessee Williams isn’t all about sex – he’s smarter than that
The playwright famed for A Streetcar Named Desire is often painted as a purveyor of Southern heat – but really he’s a social commentator