Scottish Ballet: A Streetcar Named Desire review
Tennessee Williams’ steamy Southern tragedy is powerfully rendered in dance by Scottish Ballet
The tale of Blanche Dubois and her calamitous undoing in the roiling heat of a Louisiana summer is a tragedy in the vein of the best Romantic ballets. It’s also a story driven by physicality – desire, sensuality and sex. Theatre director Nancy Meckler and choreographer Annabelle Lopez Ochoa grasped all of this when they set about transforming Tennessee Williams’ play into pure dance in 2012. This revival, the first performance in London since 2015, shows that their work has lost none of its power.
We first see Blanche fluttering on point beneath a single glowing light bulb – a delicate Southern belle, drawn to the light like a moth. Meckler’s decision to show Blanche’s whole backstory (which is only spoken about in the play) means your sympathy is with her from the off.
This is a young woman who thought a genteel future was mapped out for her, but who instead found her bridegroom in the arms of another man, held him as he died after shooting himself in despair, then watched her family fortune disintegrate. Anaesthetising the pain with drink and casual sex, Blanche ends up at the shabby New Orleans apartment of her little sister, Stella – and walks slap-bang into her nemesis, the brooding, brutish Stanley. The stage is set for disaster.
The narrative clarity of Meckler’s approach provides a perfect canvas for Lopez Ochoa’s choreography – sharp, articulate movement that carries us fluidly through the building momentum of the story. Duets and trios are key; the pas de trois as Blanche tries to wrestle her new husband from his lover is stingingly intense, the sex scenes wrenchingly acrobatic. But there are also forcefully dramatic ensemble set pieces: a wall of female opprobrium driving Blanche out of town; a darting whirl of dancers, all brandishing the letter that reveals Blanche’s shameful past; a West Side Story-like, swaggering jive-off at the bowling alley.
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Lopez Ochoa drills down neatly into the characters through gesture – Blanche’s airs and graces, Stella’s mindless attraction to her no-good husband, Stanley’s loping assumption of authority, the hapless pratfalls of Blanche’s eager suitor, Mitch. Blanche’s inner demons, driving her to pick up the bottle, are cleverly given physical form, and the ghosts of her past – blood-splattered husband, former liaisons – loom large and often. By the end, they are all part of the fantasy cabaret in Blanche’s cracked mind.
The opening night cast gave us Marge Hendrick as Blanche, who at times seems a bit too robust, but by the end is a convincingly broken-winged moth. Evan Loudon’s Stanley needs a bit more grit, but he and Hendrick summon up a suitably twisted chemistry. And Claire Souet’s Stella gives physical force to her character’s blind desire.
Peter Salem’s beguiling score (played live by the Scottish Ballet Orchestra) is a masterclass of mood setting. The sound effects instantly summon a scene, the whirr of a projector that evokes a cinema, for instance, or the crash of balls into bowling pins. It complements Nicola Turner’s less-is-more design, beautifully lit by Tim Mitchell, which takes one coup de théâtre moment – the blowing apart of a background vista of Blanche’s family home into building blocks – and uses its “rubble” to create the proceeding sets. It all comes together to make a potent piece of narrative ballet.
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