Since its première in 1947, Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire has become one of the twentieth century’s most celebrated plays. The demanding role of the tragic Southern belle Blanche Dubois has been played by some of the world’s great actresses, including Vivien Leigh, Cate Blanchett and Isabelle Huppert, in Polish director Krysztof Warlikowski’s extraordinary reimagining at the 2012 Adelaide Festival. In Anne-Louise Sarks’s Melbourne Theatre Company production, Nikki Shiels, in a masterclass battle between strength and vulnerability, steps into the role and makes it her own. In her remarkable exploration of desire, deception, and double standards, Shiels creates an exhilarating Blanche for our times.   

Sarks places the relationship between Blanche and her sister, Stella, centre stage. This creative leap positions their relationship as primary, around which all others revolve. The chemistry between Shiels’s Blanche and Michelle Lim Davidson’s Stella is heart-quickening. Together they create a potent mix of recrimination and understanding. This serves to update the narrative, while not changing it at all. It’s a bold move that gives the play a contemporary edge, even while it’s set in the past.   

Blanche arrives at her sister’s house to play her last card. Her circumstances are dire; she has nothing left to bet with. Her suitcase contains the remnants of dreams both lost and alive. Constrained by the small space women are permitted, Blanche tries to protect herself with wit and shrewdness, cloaking her intelligence in brittle gaiety. Madness is not within but without. It exists in grief and bewilderment, lies and secrets, violence and fear and reaches its zenith in desire. At the play’s beginning this is blithely summoned by a weary streetcar. By the play’s end desire is a punishing, inexorable force.

Lim Davidson’s Stella brings the plight of a woman torn between two worlds vividly to life. Her escape from her ‘genteel’ upbringing to marry Stanley leaves Blanche alone and renders Stella complicit in Blanche’s fate. At the play’s end, Stella abandons Blanche again. This collaboration in her sister’s betrayal casts a pall of tragedy over Stella too. In the play’s final moments, as her blue-clad baby is thrust into her arms, we watch in horror as the past reaches out to the future.

Nikki Shiels as Blanche, Michelle Lim Davidson as Stella, Steve Mouzakis as Mitch and Mark Leonard Winter as Stanley (photograph by Pia Johnson)

Through this powerful interpretation of the sisters’ lives, the late 1940s New Orleans setting morphs into contemporary Australia. Despite the remove of time, place, and Southern accents, the messy, complex microcosm of life depicted in Williams’s play reflects the contemporary world of escalating domestic violence. It is as stark and sober a rendering of men’s casual violence as any we read about in the media.

Despite this, Mark Leonard Winter’s Stanley is not the ‘brute’ (a word that tacitly condones and glamourises male violence) epitomised by the well-known Brando interpretation in Elia Kazan’s 1951 film. Winter’s portrayal is a nuanced study of a different kind of suffering, one in which Stanley bears the scars of endemic racism and systemic class discrimination. His calm correction of the racial slur ‘Polak’ is delivered with an emotional intensity that begs understanding. In shifting the emphasis from the physical to the psychological, however fleetingly, Winter challenges us to consider Stanley as a damaged and complex character. Conversely, Steve Mouzakis’s Mitch has a predatory quality, his latent aggression and misogyny as dangerous as Stanley’s smashed birthday plates.

The supporting cast is a strong ensemble that deftly shifts and shapes alliances and provides echoes of Blanche’s early life. They are both witness to and participants in conditions that are hot and crowded, to pleasures small and fleeting, to desire pulsing through the night like white noise. Throughout Sarks’s production, these acute levels of human suffering are bought to life by unexpected moments of levity. At best, this juxtaposition doubles as the embodiment of hope and as a ploy to delay the inevitable. At times however, this humour gives way to a level of comedy that feels at odds with the tone of the play and threatens to disarm subtler dramatic moments.             

Mel Page’s gloomy and claustrophobic set signals the end of the road. Outside the Kowalskis’ meagre two-room flat, a staircase leads to the neighbours above, through whose window we glimpse the world both beyond and within. Inside, a flimsy curtain divides the kitchen from the bedroom suggesting fragility and impermanence. The conspicuous bathroom speaks of a lack of privacy, while the ‘tub’ evokes a long-ago faded luxury. Page’s set revolves in conjunction with the escalating turmoil. This contributes to a mood of desolate oppression, one that’s reinforced by Stefan Gregory’s music, a foreboding of upbeat melancholy, whose increasing intensity shifts coolly through the heated emotion. However, the short guitar solo sits too far outside the action and upsets the otherwise smooth transition between sound and time and space. And while Niklas Pajanti’s lighting bathes the set in the heavy glow of summer nights, his interior lighting doesn’t quite manage to convey the change in atmosphere or effect that Blanche is at pains to create.

Overall, this is an stirring and original production where ‘death is expensive’ but life costs everything. Blanche’s youthful discovery that the man she loved and married was not who she thought he was has dire and irrevocable consequences. These seed an unassuageable grief that catapults her into a series of ‘intimacies with strangers’ that ultimately condemn her to a state of infinite longing. This is beautifully realised in a scene with Kaya Byrne as a young man collecting for charity; that which can never be requited, the critical object of Blanche’s desires, must remain out of reach. Her search for intimacy is a transgression for which she is cruelly punished. Sarks’s production manages to make an indelible connection between this tragedy and that of Blanche’s early young husband, whose violation of societal norms has consequences equally shocking.

A Streetcar Named Desire (Melbourne Theatre Company) continues at the Playhouse, Arts Centre Melbourne until 17 August 2024. Performance attended: 13 July.