Robin Lefevre's new production of what was (in 1947) Tennessee Williams's second significant public success in theatre is slow and muted, as if in obeisance to what the author often identified as his source of inspiration - the work of Anton Chekhov.
The characters' emotions are generally understated in performance and their physical movements often seem purposefully clumsy to the point, on occasions, of appearing theatrically unconvincing. In many previous productions of this powerful play, dramatic reality has been writ large: here it is writ small. Yet it remains emotionally precise and deeply telling.
Frances McDormand's Blanche DuBois, come without apparent cause from Laurel, where the big old family home used to be, to visit her sister Stella and her husband Stanley in their decaying two-room apartment in New Orleans, has none of flutter or flounce which has become almost a caricature of the character. Here is a determined if deceitful woman who admits she will not be looked at in the merciless glare of bright light, who confesses to being in need of kindness, and whose physical comportment is so rigidly and muscularly ordered that one can literally see the emotional tension within which she is trying to survive. This is a major performance which will deepen further as a more fluid sense of ensemble develops in the company.
The most effective performance last night came from Donna Dent as Stella, happy and open and generous and loyal to those she loves, torn between the increasingly difficult balance between her love of Stanley and her love for Blanche, each of them threatening in their very different ways. Touching is far too weak a word to cover this superb acting, but best conveys its dramatic effect.
Liam Cunningham's Stanley, even if a little more of an Irish farmer than the American son of Polish immigrants, is blissfully blunt, physically powerful and utterly uncompromising in a toweringly "ordinary" characterisation. And John Kavanagh's Mitch, the man who might just lift Blanche out of the psychological terrors in which she has wrapped herself since she "lost" the old family home, has precisely the right degrees of determination and tentativeness to leave relationships uncertain to the end.
Allen Moyer's setting is both architecturally authentic and seedily effective, in excellent lighting by Alan Burrett, and Michael Krass's costumes have the ring of appalling truth. This a production which will get even richer as it runs on and a must for any theatregoer in search of a deeply serious rendition of one of Tennessee Williams's finest and most durable plays, and it does not flinch from the homosexual core of the central drama, as many lesser earlier productions have done.
