A Streetcar Named Desire review: Scottish Ballet’s clean-cut take on Tennessee Williams’s classic

Scottish Ballet’s A Streetcar Named Desire unpacks and extends Tennessee Williams’ play, looking back through its heroine’s past. It’s an approach that loses some of the simmering tension, but adds a dreamlike sense of the forces driving these characters.

Created in 2012, this Streetcar is an early example of Scottish Ballet’s approach to narrative dance, with fluid staging and a clear-eyed look at its adult themes. Director Nancy Meckler and choreographer Annabelle Lopez Ochoa, regular collaborators, move smoothly between scenes and dance styles, supported by Nicola Turner’s design and Peter Salem’s effective score.

Ballet is a present-tense art: since it’s hard for characters to refer to their pasts, Meckler and Ochoa go right back to the beginning. We see Blanche Dubois’ marriage, her discovery of her husband’s affair with another man, the deaths of her family and the loss of her home.

The family mansion, Belle Reve, looms over the early scenes – then literally collapses, the imposing image breaking into dozens of blocks, shocking and swift. New scenes are constructed from the fallen blocks, Blanche living in the rubble of the past. Ghosts perch on them, watching her decline. Piled up, the blocks become a hotel room, a nightclub, or the cramped apartment of Blanche’s sister Stella and her husband Stanley.

Meckler and Ochoa are at their best in evoking this society, both eerie and pragmatic. The corps de ballet squeeze together to evoke the overcrowded train taking Blanche to the city, or form into icy ranks to run her out of town. Arriving at the apartment, Blanche tries to hide her reaction to the dust – then gives Stella a present of long white evening gloves, a gesture both well-meant and embarrassingly out of place.

But opening the story out dilutes its hothouse qualities. The focus remains in the past, more than the play’s shattering present. A strong, long-limbed dancer, Marge Hendrick shows us the intensity of Blanche’s emotions, and her twitchy gentility. There’s less sense of the character’s southern belle fragility, her need for denial, but her slide into madness has touching force. It’s a disaster we can see coming.

open image in gallery

Evan Loudon is a swaggering Stanley – perhaps a little clean-cut, but strong on the character’s short fuse and territorial behaviour. Claire Souet is a delicate Stella, clinging to both her sister and her husband. Thomas Edwards gives Blanche’s suitor a touch of idealism, delighted by the flowers he gives her. It’s a production that shows why characters yearn for more, even when it leads to disaster.

Until 19 May, www.sadlerswells.com