Two weeks into 2023 and we have already arrived at one of the year’s hottest, most hyped shows. The excitement around this production of Tennessee Williams’s 1947 drama of desire, delusion and mental illness has been both over its casting of screen star Paul Mescal and its director, Rebecca Frecknall, whose revival of Cabaret won copious honours last year.
A Streetcar Named Desire warrants the hype, although at first it looks as if Frecknall’s directorial vision is driven by a rampant theatricality which might eclipse Mescal’s performance (and every other) and drain the play of its emotional power.
There is slow motion movement and a sudden downpour of rain around the stage while the cast carry on props and take them away again to highlight the fact that they are each playing the role of actor as well as character. In its spirit it resembles the startlingly reworked Oklahoma! staged last year, although that production’s stylistic innovations felt edgier.
At times it seems as if we are watching rather than sinking into the play’s world, especially in the first half, although it never stops being arresting in its effects.
But gradually it gains purchase. Actors off stage sit by the sidelines and stare or circle the almost empty set, designed by Madeleine Girling, as the action takes place. Their prowling presence builds a physical kind of claustrophobia and alarm in the tiny New Orleans apartment in which Blanche DuBois (Patsy Ferran) is crammed alongside her sister, Stella (Anjana Vasan), and Stella’s husband, Stanley Kowalski (Mescal). Stanley undresses to reveal the brute threat of his musclebound form; Blanche does the same to leave her vulnerabilities exposed.
It is strongest in its use of sound (designed by Peter Rice) and music (composed by Angus MacRae). Mescal’s sudden shouts land like punches and some words turn into animal yelps. Lines from songs repeat and echo, as if Blanche is trapped in a hallucinatory loop. Most of all, drums beat and thrum while cymbals crash, creating their own aural violence (both the singer Gabriela García and drummer Tom Penn are excellent). Where Benedict Andrews’ 2014 production, starring Gillian Anderson, brought a destabilising giddiness to the drama through a constant stage revolve, it is sound that creates the discombobulating churn here. The second half retains all the theatrical tics but they come into full force, bringing dread and danger.
Mescal appears as natural on stage as on screen. He has a blank-eyed disdain for Blanche and her imperious judgments of him but we see his jealous insecurity through his rages, and that the real fight between Stanley and Blanche is for Stella’s heart.
In his assault of Blanche he becomes the “animal” that she has accused him of being – predatory, menacing, sprawled on all fours. Although this scene is choreographed as a kind of group dance, it contains a keen sense of violation.
Mescal’s performance is matched by his two accompanying leads. Ferran, who stepped in to play Blanche last month when Lydia Wilson withdrew due to an injury, is a butterfly in diaphanous dresses whose nerves are quickly jangled but who maintains a steely front in her power battles with Stanley. Vasan’s Stella, meanwhile, has soft, sensuous chemistry with Mescal and a more bristling relationship with her sister.
For all its clever artifice and non-naturalism, it is the power of these performances that gives this production its fierce and dangerous energy.
• At the Almeida, London, until 4 February.
