One of the most touching moments at the Evening Standard’s 67th Theatre Awards came when Patsy Ferran and Anjana Vasan were named joint winners of the Natasha Richardson Award for Best Actress in association with Mithridate. Ferran had stepped in at late notice to play Blanche Dubois opposite Vasan as Stella in Rebecca Frecknall’s production of A Streetcar Named Desire at the Almeida, after Lydia Wilson withdrew. The result, thanks to their indivisible sister act, was theatrical dynamite.
The two actresses seemed briefly speechless as they took to the stage at Claridge’s on Sunday, having gaped at each other as, during the announcement, it dawned on them that they were to share the award. I’d interviewed them both beforehand and asked each of them what winning would mean.
“I’m mostly just excited to see Rebecca and Anjana again and celebrate a crazy time that kicked off a year ago,” said Spanish-born, RADA-trained Ferran, 33. She’d only attended the ceremony once before, ten years ago – the year she made her London stage debut in Blithe Spirit, and totally stole the limelight from the production’s ostensible star Angela Lansbury – and wandered around before dinner “fangirling” at the table placements for Stephen Sondheim and Shirley Bassey.
“I was surprised by the nomination because Stella is usually seen as a supporting role and the play is absolutely about Blanche,” said Vasan, 36. “So if I won, I would share that with Patsy. I wouldn’t be able to take it as a singular win.”
Singaporean but born in Chennai to Tamil Hindu parents, Vasan built her career in the UK after almost randomly deciding to train in drama at the Royal Welsh College. She was previously nominated for Best Actress in the Standard Awards for her performance in A Doll’s House at the Lyric Hammersmith in 2019.
The dramatic story of this Streetcar has passed into theatre lore but it bears repetition and illumination. When Frecknall’s production was first announced for December 2022, attention focused on the casting of Paul Mescal – still hot from the success of Normal People and soon to be nominated for an Oscar for Aftersun – as the play’s brutish male lead Stanley Kowalski. Then a week before the first preview, Lydia Wilson, who had been cast as Blanche, had to pull out due to an injury.
Frecknall, faced with the collapse of the show, texted Ferran – whom she’d directed opposite Vasan in another Tennessee Williams play, Summer and Smoke, at the Almeida in 2018 – and asked if she would take over as Blanche. “I said, ‘can you give me a couple of hours to think this through?’ because it was both daunting and enticing and I needed to sort some life stuff out first,” says Ferran.
This is an understatement. She’d just married her husband, an actor she prefers not to name, and was about to go on honeymoon to visit her wider family in Spain.
“I don’t ever want to be the person who puts career over the people I love,” Ferran laughs, “but my husband encouraged me. He said, I think you’ll regret it if you don’t do it. Let’s just rearrange the honeymoon.” So she said yes to Frecknall, had a panic attack that night at 3am about the number of lines she had to learn, and tried to pull out the following morning. “My agent said it had already been announced, so I was like, oh, okay, let’s go with it…”
“It was the right decision for Lydia, who’s a friend and an incredible actress, to withdraw because she was recovering from injury and it wasn’t sustainable for her to go on,” says Vasan. “But it was traumatic for the whole cast. Because it was so late into production, and I'd made so many decisions about who Stella is, based on what Lydia brought into the room, I was worried about who was going to step in.
“When I heard it was Patsy there was a sense of relief because she’s someone with whom I have done a Tennessee Williams play and who is a friend and we have a chemistry and a shorthand. I could kind of immediately see her and I knew it would be completely different, but also I knew how I could navigate what I was doing in order to make that relationship still work.” She smiles. “I feel like I'm the luckiest Stella in performance history because I basically played the part opposite two incredible Blanches, one of them that no one got to see.”
The Blanche that audiences did get to see was astonishing. Though Ferran was young for the role she utterly convinced as a fraying southern gentlewoman, desperate for affection and security.
“The play is so good that if you just stand in the right place and say the lines in the right order it will be a success,” says Ferran modestly. Vasan was equally impressive, giving Stella a volcanic sexuality and a heartbreaking concern for Blanche. Though Mescal gave a superb, menacingly coiled performance, Stanley became almost a peripheral figure, a mere trigger to the play’s tragedy.
“Tennessee Williams wrote a letter to a friend and said he was about to write a play about two sisters, and it’s so clear that’s what it’s about on the page,” says Vasan. “The play begins with their estrangement and reunion and it ends with them being ripped apart.”
Mescal didn’t seem to mind ceding centre-stage either. Vasan and Ferran pay tribute to his selflessness as an actor and the lightness with which he wears the fame that brought adoring female fans to the stage door of the Almeida and then the Phoenix, where the production transferred for a sold-out run.
“Offstage he’s kind and generous but there’s a mercurial energy he brings on stage: although you always feel safe, you don’t know what he’s going do to,” says Ferran. ”He didn't shy away from the violence and the ugly nature of Stanley, which I really admired. He didn't play into the leading man stuff, having to feel attractive or liked – he just went ape” (as an aside, Ferran laughingly confesses she still hasn’t watched Normal People). “I think he deserves all the attention and accolades that are coming towards him,” says Vasan, who has seen Normal People.
The panel for the Standard awards went into the judging session with a feeling that Ferran’s extraordinary achievement made her an obvious winner, but all of us, I think, carried a secret torch for Vasan. The decision to award it to both seemed absolutely right the moment we took it. Both are primarily theatre actors, little known to the wider public (though Vasan has also drawn attention in Black Mirror and the comedy series We Are Lady Parts, about a Muslim female punk band). Frecknall and Mescal were both nominated for awards, but again, it seems fitting that the actual statuette went to the women who portrayed sisterhood so vividly and searingly.
Both have been busy since. Vasan is filming the second series of Lady Parts, and says it is as important, in terms of representation, to be on a set “where I was not the only brown person, but one of 20, in the cast and behind the scenes”, as it was to appear in Streetcar, where her ethnicity was irrelevant. Ferran fitted in her Spanish visit between the Almeida and West End runs of Streetcar, and she and her husband spent a blissful second honeymoon in Margate after her subsequent run as Eliza Doolittle in Pygmalion at the Old Vic.
You’re part of showbiz mythology now, I tell her: you’ll always be the actress who delivered a devastating Blanche Dubois in a week.
“I don’t think about it on a daily basis and sometimes I forget it happened,” she says. “Because of the award and talking to you I’ve been forced to reminisce, but usually I’m onto the next job. And my memory is appalling. I can’t remember any of the parts I’ve done except the very first one I did at school.”
Which was? “Shylock in the Merchant of Venice: it was an all-girls school,” she grins, before launching into a word-perfect rendering of the “many a time and oft” speech. So if an actor playing Shylock had to withdraw from a production at the last minute, I say… “Yes!” she grins again. “Call me up, no problem.”
