Peripeteia

Critical Reception and Notable productions

The critical reception of Williams' play has changed over time, as cultural materialist critics would expect, with each moment of production foregrounding slightly different aspects of the play but it always comes back to the Blanche-Stanley dynamic. Bess Rowen observes that the general trend in productions “is to cast an actor who is over 40 but still youthful, beautiful and vivacious to play Blanche alongside actors not known for brute force or uncontrollable sexuality as Stanley.”9 It is a remarkably enduring play with numerous American and international productions since 1947. The most notable recent production was directed by Rebecca Frecknall in 2023 and starred Irish actor, Paul Mescal, as Stanley. Frecknall’s vision of the play saw a return closer to Williams’ original Stanley, with 27 year old Mescal delivering a performance of “fierce and dangerous energy.” 10 Other reviews note the innovative use of sound and music in this production, something that Williams would be delighted with.

For the sake of brevity this section will limit its focus to the first Broadway production and subsequent 1951 film, both directed by Elia Kazan, and Benedict Andrews’ 2014 production for the National Theatre. The logic is simple. Both of these are easily available to watch in their entirety. Kazan’s 1951 film is widely available to stream online or watch on DVD and Andrews’ production can be rented via the NTHome website. Minor diversions will be made to other productions to explore more unusual or noteworthy approaches to the play.

Initial Reception
On its initial Broadway production in December 1947, the play was both lauded and criticised. However, despite some mixed reviews the overall impression was favourable: it was a Broadway smash running for 855 performances and winning Williams a Pulitzer prize in the process. Together with Arthur Miller, Williams’ plays were seen as reinvigorating American theatre after World War Two, staging more risk-taking and visceral drama. Streetcar… was certainly thrillingly controversial in the racy, sensationalist sexual behaviours it depicted. Both Blanche’s promiscuity and Allan Gray’s tortured homosexuality would have shocked the conservative audiences of mid-20th Century America, not to mention Stanley’s appalling sexual violence, but there is also the frankness about discussing the nature of sexual desire in marriage itself. It’s no wonder the critic C.W.E. Bigsby describes it as “the first American play in which sexuality was the core of the lives of all its principal characters.” 11

The undoubted star of the original broadway show was Marlon Brando, then an unknown 23 year old actor, just starting out on his journey to becoming one of the most important actors of the 20th Century, an actor who “gave us our freedom,” according to Jack Nicholson. Brando’s naturalistic, and radically new, Method acting crashed up against the more classical acting style of British actress Jessica Tandy as Blanche, causing a type of performance conflict that fed beautifully into the play’s central conflict. Brando was too young to match the Stanley of Williams’ play but Williams himself thought that Brando brought something that redeemed Stanley a little: “the brutality or callousness of youth.” 12 In other words Stanley is so destructive because he’s immature and hasn’t learned to grow up yet. Maybe. However, early audiences hoovered this up, laughing along with Stanley’s comic barbs at Blanche and seemingly siding with the aggressor rather than the protagonist, much to Tandy’s outrage. While Tandy received glowing reviews (Brooks Atkinson in The New York Times: “it does seem almost incredible that she can convey it [her performance] with so many shades and impulses that are accurate, revealing and true” 13), it was Brando’s searingly intense performances that audiences came for. Richard Watts Jr, in a New York Post review, praised Brando’s “portrayal of the heroine’s sullen, violent nemesis as an excellent piece of work.” 14 Kirsten Shepherd-Barr argues that “Brando made it Stanley’s play, whereas [Williams’ original playscript and] later productions emphasised Blanche.” 15 Of course, Brando’s movie-star good looks certainly helped too, especially in the film version. All-in-all, Brando casts a shadow of deepest dark over every Stanley that followed, and will follow, him, especially because his performance has been captured on film for all to see. He is a reference point for Stanley that almost consumes the role itself, like a theatrical black hole.

Kazan’s 1947 production jettisoned the more Expressionistic flourishes of Williams’ original stage directions, especially the lurid shadowy shapes that flame up the walls as Blanche mentally disintegrates. Wolcott Gibbs, in The New Yorker, describes it as “a fine and deeply disturbing play, almost faultless in the physical details of its production and the quality of its acting” and the way that the play “mount slowly and inexorably to its shocking climax.” 16 Gibbs also praises Joel Mielziener’s highly effective stage set, which he describes as a “gruesome interior” characterised by “decaying horror” through its “sparse and dreadful” furnishings. 17 Brooks Atkinson is more restrained in his hyperbole but also compliments “the shadowy environment” Mielziner creates to house Williams’ “poignant and luminous story.” 18 Bess Rowen describes the set as creating a space that “looked both grim and imposing and artificially contained, mirroring Blanche’s feelings towards her setting.” 19

However, it wasn’t all gushing praise. Gibbs had reservations about the “incredible” aspects of the plot, concerned that Blanche’s fall from Belle Reve leisure lady to mentally unstable down-and-out was “a good deal more picturesque than probable,” feeling that “her degradation is much too rapid and complete.” 20 Whereas Susannah Clapp, in a 2014 Guardian review, called it “one of the most glorious switchback plays ever written,” 21 most of the early criticism was aimed at the structure of the play, some critics complaining about its episodic structure and refusal to stick to a tighter, more conventional form. Unsurprisingly, the darkness of the content also provoked some objections. The violence, the urban squalor, the sexual frankness and predatorial, coarse and boorish antagonist all contributed to an “almost desperately morbid turn of mind,” according to Richard Watts Jr. 22 J.C. Trewin goes a lot further calling the play “a squalid anecdote of a nymphomaniac's decay in a New Orleans slum” 23 - harsh! The pessimistic ending doesn’t help either: the protagonist is ravaged, sexually and mentally, and stumbles out of the play into oblivion; her sister commits her to an asylum while deluding herself about her rapist husband; and finally, the sexual predator escapes punishment, being rewarded with a devoted wife and a new baby son. It’s hardly life-affirming stuff.