A Streetcar Named Desire, Scottish Ballet, review: 'tugs at the heart-strings, shreds the nerves'

Scottish Ballet's version of A Streetcar Named Desire does Tennessee Williams's steamy, pitch-black masterpiece full justice, says Mark Monahan

A Streetcar Named Desire performed by Scottish Ballet at Sadler's Wells
A Streetcar Named Desire performed by Scottish Ballet at Sadler's Wells Credit: Photo: Andy Ross

Scottish Ballet’s A Streetcar Named Desire is a satisfying case of an expertly chosen play turned brilliantly into dance. First staged in 2012, this adaptation of Tennessee Williams’s steamy, pitch-black, Southern Gothic melodrama is now back, at the close of a UK tour, for a criminally brief run at Sadler’s Wells. And both it and the company are looking as sharp as knives.

The work of theatre director Nancy Meckler and choreographer Annabelle Lopez Ochoa (a cross-discipline partnership that really shows), this model of economical storytelling embraces the essential truth that dance has to show rather than tell. In other words, where the play sees Blanche DuBois – the fading belle who fatally seeks refuge at her sister’s cramped New Orleans house – explain her crucial back-story in dialogue, this Streetcar turns it into direct, linear narrative.

True, this means that a hefty 40 minutes pass before Blanche actually makes it to Stella’s. And the show does later balk at trying to explain the exact significance of the various papers in Blanche’s case and the all-important letter – a knowledge of the Williams original is useful here. But in the main, the narrative could not be clearer.

It begins with Blanche (Eve Mutso) dancing solo, en pointe, outside Belle Reve, the DuBois family pile as doomed as Blanche’s sanity. She is elegant, feminine, alluring, but also has a moth-like vulnerability and fractures in her line that hint at psychological frailty.

Eve Mutso as Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire (Andy Ross)

Her marriage to Alan (Victor Zarallo), discovery of him with another man and brutal rejection of him, along with his suicide, are beautifully rendered: a tender pas de deux between the boys gives way to a suitably spiky pas de trois, then a deathy silence broken only by a cannon-like gunshot, while an extra, thunderous coup de théâtre makes all the remaining action play out against the rubble of Belle Reve – clever.

Once in New Orleans, Tim Mitchell’s lighting is yellower and more intense, Peter Salem’s score both jazzier and darker, Blanche’s hallucinations and fantasies (potently fleshed out by the corps) more vivid. Perhaps most crucial of all, though, are the lead performances. Victor Zarallo’s Alan is sweetly drawn and eloquently danced, with Lewis Landini also excellent as a gawkily well-meaning but then fiercely disappointed Mitch (Blanche’s suitor and potential saviour). Sophie Martin, meanwhile, is devastatingly sexy and articulate as Stella, her loyalties vividly torn between Blanche and her husband, Stanley Kowalski (Erik Cavallari).

Cavallari is just super as Stanley, a depiction of prowling, unyielding masculinity absolutely in the mould of Brando (who famously played him in Elia Kazan’s 1951 film), while Eve Mutso’s Blanche is, if anything, better still. A lyrical classicist, Mutso (who created the role) is also an electrifying actress, and the horror that registers on her face, as in her frayed body-language, is at times almost too much to bear.

The culminative rape scene is, true to form, delivered without a dash of sugar-coating. As brutal as it is un-gratuitous, it crowns a punchy and very grown-up piece of entertainment that does Williams’s 1947 masterpiece full justice, repeatedly tugging at the heart-strings even as it shreds the nerves.

Until April 2. Tickets: 0844 412 4300; sadlerswells.com. Returns only