A Streetcar Named Desire

Olivier Award-winning director David Thacker gets Bolton’s new season off to a flyer with this superbly crafted and deeply moving revival of Tennesee Williams’s perennially disturbing play. Probably more than any other from the late 1940s, it simmers with sexual tension, touching on so many subjects still considered distasteful – and this production, done in the round, beautifully captures the whole sweating, seedy New Orleans’ French Quarter background.

Clare Foster, Millie Brown in The Bill in an earlier incarnation, is stunningly good in the role of fading, febrile southern belle, Blanche Dubois, perhaps the playwright’s finest creation, a bundle of neuroses, beautiful and fragile yet fatally flawed. And this portrayal certainly stands comparison with those of Glenn Close, Jessica Lange and Rachel Weisz in recent years.

Local favourite, the muscular Kieran Hill, gives the performance of his career to date as Blanche’s adversary, the crude and insolently brutal Stanley Kowalski, always avoiding aping or caricaturising Brando and occasionally contriving to suggest he is a victim too.

Ex-Emmerdale actress, Amy Nuttall, recently lauded for her starring role in The Hired Man, is a noble, unpretentious and submissive Stella, torn between her husband and her sister, whilst Huw Higginson convinces as the mother’s boy Mitch, Blanche’s improbable suitor.

Ciaran Bagnall’s set, a battered two-roomed apartment and surrounding street, not only reinforces the gritty social realism but suggests the horror on the inside is not necessarily a thing apart.

Streetcars come along fairly regularly these days but this is one not to miss.