A compelling blend of sensuality and subtext. Shows how a narrative ballet can be just as powerful as language
Intense, sensual, poignant. Dangerously intriguing, A Streetcar Named Desire has continuously lured its audience for more than half a century. Years ago, Scottish Ballet transformed this Tennessee Williams classic into a ballet piece blending traditional ballet techniques with contemporary choreography and a modern jazz orchestra (scored by Peter Salem and performed by the Scottish Ballet Orchestra). Several years later, it revisits Sadler’s Wells under the direction of Nancy Meckler and choreography by Annabelle Lopez Ochoa.
The show is in general well-structured and devised. Nicola Turner’s design astounds with its brilliance, handling both the vast and majestic sets like the old house of Belle Reve that is devastated into ashes in the first act. It also captures the most delicate and trivial moments such as at the beginning and end, where Blanche (Marge Hendrick) dances upwards to a light bulb, indicating the play’s original name Moth – a creature desperately yearning for what will eventually destroy her.
The design works seamlessly with Tim Mitchell’s lighting and Ochoa’s choreography. At the DuBois house in Belle Reve, the house party dance features the ensemble with elegant waltz and bright light. When the narrative progresses towards the working-class New Orleans setting, the vibe shifts to 1920s swingy-jazzy music in nightclubs of poker games with ambiguous and flirtatious purple-blue lighting tone coming into effect. Interwoven is the haunting ghost of Alan (Javier Andreu) – Blanche’s late husband who committed suicide due to his homosexuality – appearing intermittently, with eerie blue lighting symbolising Blanche’s internal world.
Portrayed by Scottish Ballet principal Marge Hendrick, Blanche exhibits a characteristic of extreme delicate neurosis. At the meantime, she performs a powerful bodily presence that depicts another side of Blanche, implicit in the text: her secret desire for Stanley. Evan Loudon prowls the stage through his alpha-male portrayal of Stanley, often half-naked, forming a tacit and remote parallel to Blanche’s frequent bathing ritual, each hinting at their unconscious attempt to attract the other’s attention.
Together with Loudon, Claire Souet as Stella delivers an extraordinary duet featuring the couple’s consummation, which is elegant, symbolic, and extremely sensual. This contrasts sharply with the late sexual assault scene as cold and brutal. However, compared to Stella and Stanley’s duet, this scene feels less choreographed, simply mimicking in a realistic way that fails to convince and strike the audience. Thomas Edwards portrays a Mitch, Blanche’s fiancé, as an antithesis of Stanley – dingy, nice, yet lacking any magnetic charm.
Nevertheless, beyond the cast and creative team, I quite doubt the production’s decision of the “prologue” in the first act. In the original play, Blanche’s traumatic and devastating past is only revealed through her conversations with Stella and Stanley, as well as Stanley’s own investigation. This gradual revelation process builds up suspense and drama, and it creates a crucial power dynamic in storytelling: whose version do you believe, Blanche’s monologues or Stanley’s investigations? What is illusion and what is real?
Those questions are gone with its plot dynamic when Meckler decides to dance out Blanche’s past at the very beginning of the show, nullifying all dramatic tension and suspense into a plain and dull chronicle. Even though the haunting ghost of Alan appears several times to remind us of Blanche’s incrementally collapsing psyche, this appears as much lightweight.
A Streetcar Named Desire showcases the potentiality of how a narrative ballet can be just as compelling as the power of language, yet it could undoubtedly achieve greater depth if richer and more complex storytelling devices and techniques could be employed.