Patsy Ferran and Paul Mescal impress on this ingenious tackle A Streetcar Named Desire on the Almeida Theatre
“How pretty the sky is! I ought to go there on a rocket that never comes down”
With the final minute withdrawal of Lydia Wilson resulting from harm, Rebecca Frecknall’s manufacturing of A Streetcar Named Desire might need had a rocky starting. But with Patsy Ferran stepping in, resuming their inventive collaboration from Summer and Smoke and Frecknall nonetheless using excessive from her excellent work on Cabaret, you’d by no means know any completely different.
For although this can be a Tennessee Williams play, it’s most undoubtedly a Frecknall manufacturing. With designer Madeleine Girling, she has created a stripped again and extremely stylised interpretation which resets our expectations of this deeply private drama. Blanche is one other of Williams’ makes an attempt to wrestle with the legacy of his troubled sister and Ferran makes pleasingly attention-grabbing work of it.
As she pushes Blanche nearer to the sting when it comes to her wavering psychological well being proper from the beginning, there’s an actual sense of interior power to her as properly, a cannier facet which isn’t all the time current. In arriving in New Orleans, the strains are clearly drawn as Anjana Vasan’s glorious Stella bristles on the arrival of her sister and Paul Mescal’s brutish Stanley clocks her intentions in the direction of his pal Mitch, Dwane Walcott sustaining the cracking efficiency stage.
I’ve not seen Normal People, nor Aftersun but, so I do know nothing about Mescal except for hype, however I used to be extremely impressed along with his work right here. Under Lee Curran’s lighting, the staging is very intimate and beneath the ever-present gaze of the corporate, there’s nowhere to cover. The minor mis-step for me was with the intrusive use of music, an intervention too far maybe, although nothing actually to distract from this thrilling piece of theatre.