This article is taken from the February 2023 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

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It is 75 years since Tennessee Williams’s Streetcar Named Desire first trundled out of the backyards of New Orleans onto stages and exam syllabuses worldwide. Its freight of lust, anger, prejudice and the seductive, destructive power of delusion turned out to be winning combination.

The play’s dissonant chords resonate in a century looking afresh at the power balance between men and women and the tensions of indigenous and new communities. The paradox of Streetcar is that this “stagiest” of works in its 1940s melee of sex, suicide and southern discomfort, maps onto America’s contemporary political divides.

The play’s dissonant chords resonate in a century looking afresh at the power balance between men and women

There’s not much question as to which other thuggish man-child Stanley Kowalski would have voted for over the last few years and Blanche DuBois would most certainly have complained about the pulling down of confederate statuary.

Out of the uneasy triangle of Blanche, her milksop sister Stella, and Stanley, the bro-in-law from hell, Williams knits a work in which almost every scene, however familiar, leaves us wishing things could somehow end differently.

Marlon Brandon’s early screen performance as Kowalski, whose animal ferocity led Arthur Miller to brand him “a sexual terrorist … a brute who bore the truth,” has proved hard for successors to escape. But Williams’s exhaustive stage directions also urge us to feel the attraction Stanley exudes: “Animal joy is implicit in all of his movements and attitudes”. It is a conundrum for actors navigating between making him by turns appealing and repulsive.

In the new London Almeida’s production, Paul Mescal, whose roles in Sally Rooney’s Normal People and in Aftersun sensitively channel male disconnection, gives us a Kowalski whose clumsiness and swagger is off set by glimmers of inferiority, albeit of the kind which manifests as aggression.

Menace hangs over the stage from the moment he meets a cowering, tipsy Blanche, carting her suitcase of stardust memories and feather boa — and promptly draws attention to his sweat and love of hard exercise (even if it is restricted to bowling and beer).

The Kowalskis’ cramped quarters in Rebecca Frecknall’s production become an emotional boxing ring in which Blanche (Patsy Ferran) and Stanley slug it out with pregnant Stella (Anjana Vasan), stranded between two egos more powerful than her own.

Vasan’s anxious, edgy incarnation is also part of a practised ritual of avoidance: she does not really want to know  too much of what financial disaster hit their family home of Belle Reve. In Williams’s companion play Summer and Smoke, the evasive Alma calls herself “one of those weak and divided people who slip like shadows among your solid strong ones” and Stella is her spiritual cousin.

Menace hangs over the stage from the moment he meets a cowering, tipsy Blanche — and promptly draws attention to his sweat and love of hard exercise

Frecknall has turned into a hot property right now, directing the raunchy Cabaret in the West End and Summer and Smoke, for the Almeida last year. Salty drama is clearly her thing and a go at the big enchilada of southern drama looked promising.

It has, however, been hamstrung by the last-minute withdrawal for health reasons of Lydia Wilson who played a snippy, snappy Kate, Princess of Wales, in Mike Bartlett’s mischievous romp, King Charles III. The real royal drama currently playing out in fights, feuds and flounces must make Bartlett itch to pick up the tongue-in-cheek franchise. At this rate, there is every chance Meghan and Harry will offer to star in person.

As a very late sub for Wilson as Blanche, Ferran has had to pick up one of the more complex and demanding female roles at short notice and she does so creditably. Hers is a waif-like creature, soaking away her day-dreaming days in the bath and exuding fluttery vulnerability, flinching and twitching her way from crisis to collapse. She also has a nice style in fake assurance, boasting familiarity with the classics, but resorts to the crass language of racist insults when roused.

For many young theatregoers however, Mescal is the star attraction, his Kirk-Douglas chin and broad physicality are well primed for conveying retribution in sexual violence and the triumph of the destructive will. His stand-out scene is one which nails the casualty of contempt for incomers down the decades: “I am not a Pollack. People from Poland are Poles. They are not Pollacks. But what I am is one hundred per cent American. I’m born and raised in the greatest country on this earth and I’m proud of it.”

Given its difficult journey, Frecknall’s Streetcar is a commendable, if not stellar outing

Pride here hardens into abuse and Blanche’s ironic last line about relying on the “kindness of strangers” after she has been raped by Kowalski and is being carted off to a mental institution is one that needs more punch than Ferran gives it.

Her speaking skill is better displayed in the memory scenes and in Madeleine Girling’s spare set design; the shadow of Blanche’s dead gay lover is played by an actor dancing yogically, when she remembers him. It’s a bit capital-C choreographic for me, but a reminder of the many tragedies and victims that go into the making of Blanche’s f nal collapse.

Given its difficult journey, Frecknall’s Streetcar is a commendable, if not stellar outing. Mescal’s performance — he turns just 27 in February — reminds me to urge that you catch him on the big screen as a struggling, loving single father to an adolescent girl father in Aftersun. It packs a mighty emotional punch of its own about loss and memories and is a reminder to treasure families, however fraught, while we have them — with the possible exception of the Kowalskis.