It must be tempting for an actor playing Blanche DuBois to be unhinged from the start. Once they know the emotional battering the character is about to go through – the layers of regret and recrimination made volatile by drink – they would have cause to enter with an air of hysteria. But Kirsty Stuart is too subtle an actor for that.
As the unsteady centre of Tennessee Williams’s 1947 play, directed here by Elizabeth Newman, she repeatedly reminds us of the respectable teacher she claims to be. She is not merely dissembling to cover up a dissolute lifestyle. This is a woman with the intelligence, charm and perhaps even empathy to be an admired member of the community. As she cracks, her declarations of superiority become ever more hollow, but she has enough poise and spark to make you believe her life is not entirely a sham.
This makes her clashes with sister Stella and brother-in-law Stanley Kowalski all the more brittle. Nalini Chetty’s Stella is a fascinating contrast to her wayward big sister. On a rotating set by Emily James, its spiral staircase glinting under Jeanine Byrne’s lights that turn everything a brooding copper and green, she is at once plainer and more self-assured, having none of Blanche’s élan but so much more rootedness. She has the quiet charisma of a woman who has got exactly what she wants.
And what she wants, riskily and lustily, is Matthew Trevannion’s Stanley. In a production unafraid to swim into the play’s undercurrent of domestic violence, he is both scarily assertive and troublingly magnetic. With shaven head and tattooed arms, he bellows for attention before spitting out his words. Accused of being an ape, he pounds his chest in defiance. He is every inch the “unrefined type”.
Chetty’s Stella is his sexual equal, but Stuart’s Blanche is continually wrong-footed by him, flinching and retreating, even as her intellect tells her she should be his match. Their exchanges are intense, the volume ratcheted up to 11 in a pummelling production that comes most alive when any combination of these three actors is on stage. The languid rhythms of Pippa Murphy’s jazz score does nothing to quell their passions.
At Pitlochry Festival theatre until 30 September
