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Eve Mutso as Blanche DuBois with ensemble dancers in A Streetcar Named Desire.
Award-winning production … Eve Mutso as Blanche DuBois with ensemble dancers in A Streetcar Named Desire. Photograph: Andy Ross
Award-winning production … Eve Mutso as Blanche DuBois with ensemble dancers in A Streetcar Named Desire. Photograph: Andy Ross

A Streetcar Named Desire review – erotic and tragic ballet

This article is more than 8 years old
Sadler’s Wells, London
Beautifully told and performed, Scottish Ballet’s inventive and minimal production has an immensely touching Blanche DuBois

In 2012, when Ashley Page commissioned this adaptation of Tennessee Williams’s play, the project looked like a gamble. Page (the outgoing director of Scottish Ballet) was trusting the work to Annabelle Lopez Ochoa, a Colombian-Belgian choreographer then little known in the UK, and to Nancy Meckler – a fine theatre director but a novice to classical ballet. Yet the risk paid off, and three years on, this ballet looks set to be a keeper.

Stylistically, the work’s inventive minimalism looks just as good a second time around. The sets are constructed out of packing cases, deftly manoeuvered by the dancers to shunt the action from a streetcar to a New Orleans club, to the grimly sparse interior of Stanley’s apartment. Unfussy lighting and costumes provide pitch-perfect period detail as well as the symbolic underpinning of the plot: the bloom of bright red blood on Alan’s shirt, the crimson flowers for the dead, the naked lightbulb under which Blanche flutters, moth-like and helpless.

Aided by the bold colours of Peter Salem’s score, Lopez Ochoa choreographs her narrative with confidence and range. The big ensembles, the wedding dances and lindy jives flow naturally from the smaller moments – and how interesting it is to see a female choreographer handling a ballet’s sex scenes. In the very erotic duet between Stella and Stanley, it may be him doing the heavy lifting, but it is her tiny, clutching, grabbing body that is in control. As for the rape scene, its horror is focused not on the act of penetration but on the preceding struggle, during which Blanche is stripped, manhandled and degraded by Stanley to become an abject thing.

Eve Mutso as Blanche DuBois with Andrew Peasgood as Alan in A Streetcar Named Desire. Photograph: Andy Ross

If this production has a flaw, it’s the compression of too much plot into too many scenes. Some of these feel redundant (the mime of the DuBois family decline) while others (the hotel room where Blanche’s seeks the “comfort of strangers”) feel confusingly shortchanged. Nonetheless, the core of the story is beautifully told and performed. Erik Cavallari’s Stanley is a bulldog of angry testosterone, gnawed by insecurity, Sophie Martin a vibrant, conflicted Stella. And while Eve Mutso’s strong, beautiful body may not be a natural physical fit for Blanche, she compensates in other ways. Dancing all the time as though her spatial awareness was slightly off, Mutso carries herself with a muddled dignity and grace that make this Blanche immensely touching.

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