Movie review: A Streetcar Named Desire

Gillian Anderson in A Streetcar Name Desire.

Cast: Gillian Anderson, Ben Foster, Vanessa Kirby
Director: Benedict Andrews
Running time: 180 mins
Rating: R13

Verdict: Brilliantly staged and shot

The set deserves star billing in this Young Vic production released in cinemas under the NT Live* banner. Williams' game-changing 1947 play is best known for the 1951 Elia Kazan film version starring Vivien Leigh and Marlon Brando (the latter in his first starring role), but this revival breathes new life into a classic.

Blanche DuBois (Anderson), a faded Southern belle, arrives on the doorstep of her sister, Stella (Kirby), in the French Quarter of New Orleans. (Tottering slightly on her high heels, Anderson enters with Louis Vuitton luggage - surely a hat tip to Cate Blanchett's Blanche-derived character in Woody Allen's Blue Jasmine). Her booze-fuelled bravado doesn't take long to start slipping, however, and the slip is accelerated as the conflict starts ratcheting up between her and Stella's blue-collar husband Stanley (Foster) and an unpalatable past is uncovered.

This trio, ably complemented by Corey Johnson as Mitch, the slightly shambling decent man who briefly looks like Blanche's rescuer, make a fine fist of the hothouse dramatics, and of the marvellously super-naturalistic dialogue which is an inspired blend of the poetic and the vernacular.

And Magda Willi's design is a revelation. A skeletal construction open on all sides, it's on a turntable stage that keeps changing the audience's angle of view. Like the characters, it conceals much, but sometimes reveals more than might have been wished for, and, aided by precision cutting between several cameras, it wonderfully evokes the steady whirling disintegration of Blanche's world.

Anderson's Blanche is titanic and harrowing, though it could use more light and shade: her voice, hoarse with desperation and fatal puzzlement, is a little too one-note through the long running time and may make you pine for the more pared-back Leigh performance. Foster, however, is terrific as Stanley, neither riffing on nor seeking to compete with Brando's epoch-making turn. His rippling pecs hint at a man all bound-up but chillingly in control, so his explosions of anger generate a shocking force. A stunner.

*NT Live is a project of London's National Theatre in which productions are filmed and broadcast in real time to cinemas on both sides of the Atlantic. We get them here on hard drive a few weeks later.

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- TimeOut