A Streetcar Named Desire

The well known classic – A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams should need no introduction.

However, just in case you have been living on a different planet since the first stage play in 1947 at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre in New York, (where it closed in 1949 after 855 performances) and the many incarnations that followed, here is basically what it is about------life, death, reality, fantasy, domestic violence, the plight of women, and how our society deals (or doesn’t deal) with these issues.

The plot itself is extremely simple. Blanche DuBois, a former Southern Belle, leaves her privileged background to move into a shabby apartment in New Orleans rented by her younger sister and brother-in-law.
It is not this simple plot, but the excursion into the characters, society and the times in which they lived that makes us squirm. Maybe this is why the play has had such a long life. It is always relevant.

As Otis Reading said in his last recording before his plane crashed - “Look like nothin’s gonna change, everything still remains the same”

What the reviewers have had to say about past versions of this play:-

“..... a fine and deeply disturbing play....a strong, wholly believable play that, starting in a low key, mounts slowly and inexorably to its shocking climax” New Yorker Review by Wolcott Gibbs December 5 , 1947

......a brilliant, implacable play about the disintegration of a woman, or, if you like, of a society..... . It seems so simple on the surface, but it lives in your brain long afterwards, becoming more and more complex as time goes on.”
Rotten Tomatoes – by Dr. Matt Neal – 26th October 2021

“And the famous kindness for which Blanche is so pathetically grateful: that is merely the world’s shrugging indifference or cruelty that Blanche, self-deluding to the last, tries to transmute into compassion.”
The Guardian (UK) review by Peter Bradshaw 7th February 2020.