Cast

Synopsis

A streetcar named “Desire” brings Blanche DuBois to Elysian Fields, the down-town French quarter of New Orleans, to visit her sister and brother-in-law. Blanche is accustomed to expensive pretty clothes and to using her physical charms to attract and manipulate the men around her. Faced with the harsh realities of cheek-by-jowl living in cramped conditions where the hot and humid atmosphere gives rise to short tempers and outbursts of passionate feelings, she antagonises her family and then begins a downward spiral of delusion. Tennessee Williams’ superb portrayal of the widely contrasting members of the family and the complex relationships between them makes a powerful and compulsive play.

Directors Notes

All our stage is the world and all the players merely men and women, and our stage has no privacy or escape. Take a sensitive person, add a moderate dose of tragedy, a modicum of family antipathy, and a generous measure of bad luck and he or she may well finish up ‘dependent on the kindness of strangers’, Many directors, Elia Kazan and Tony Reavill among them, have observed that Blanche is Tennessee Williams. This play is about his insecurity in an unforgiving society. He was a charming, highly emotional, articulate man who enchanted men and women alike; but, although he knew the loneliness attendant on having too many relationships, he also enjoyed public recognition and success, and when he died there were streetcars in New Orleans draped in black!