This play is set in 1947. What it says about us will surprise you

You might think that a play written in 1947 and set in the crowded and steamy streets of New Orleans would have little to say to Australians in 2024. But picture this: at a make-believe apartment inside a large rehearsal space in Melbourne, an awkward seduction is ending badly. Blanche DuBois is trying to extricate herself from the grasp of a gentleman caller, who is missing all her signals. When Mitch’s hands remain on her waist, she tells him politely but firmly, in a rich southern accent: “You may release me now.” He seems confused – “huh?” – so she tries again: “I said unhand me, sir.” Finally, he gets it.

Tennessee Williams’ classic, A Streetcar Named Desire, has landed at the MTC with impeccable timing. In a country grappling with the awful toll of gendered violence, what we’re seeing feels anything but dated.

Actors Nikki Shiels and Steve Mouzakis are finding their way into the scene under the razor-sharp gaze of MTC artistic director Anne-Louise Sarks. Rehearsals are in their early stages - “we’re still in the weeds”, as Shiels and Sarks will tell me later – but the play’s big themes, and their modern-day relevance, are already apparent.

Mouzakis could be speaking straight from the playbook of current discussions about consent when he says of Mitch: “There’s a lot in there, whether he’s ashamed of what he’s just done or [feels that] maybe he’s offended her in some way.”

Given Blanche’s circumstances, Mitch needn’t worry. He might be dull and clumsy but Blanche will cling to him as if to a life raft, and so she reassures him: “You’re a natural gentleman, one of the very few that are left in the world.” A faded southern belle who has been dismissed from the school where she seduced a young man, and brought low by the loss of her family’s estate, Blanche is, as she famously observes, wholly dependent on “the kindness of strangers”.

With nowhere else to go, she has moved into the cramped and tattered New Orleans apartment where her younger sister, Stella, lives with her brutish husband, Stanley. His frequent violent outbursts create a pressure-cooker atmosphere that offers anything but refuge. Tensions mount, a rape occurs and Blanche’s fragile grip on reality crumbles – in the final scene, she is led away to an asylum.

“When I read [the play] again recently,” says Sarks, “I was really struck by [how] there’s something alive inside the work, about a generation pushing against the status quo. In 1947, that was post-World War II; societal expectations around gender [and] relationships were being tested and for some people that was thrilling and exciting, and for others, that was quite terrifying, in the sense that something you’re entitled to might not come through.

“That started to manifest, as I read the script, as a kind of fear, or aggression. And sometimes in violence. That struggle for identity and to know your place felt really resonant.”

In crafting a fresh response to the play, Sarks kept asking herself: “What if Blanche wasn’t crazy? What if we understood her actions as the response to trauma … if we see her as vulnerable and as a survivor? That’s a different angle in, I think, to Blanche’s story, and one that, again, feels very contemporary.

“I’d also never seen a production that had a female lens on it in the way that I see it in my imagination, and so I really wanted to test that out.

“I think if you use a word like ‘crazy’ or ‘fragile’, it stops us as an audience having to ask questions about every interaction. It sort of becomes an answer to what’s going on and it also becomes an excuse for the Stanleys and the Mitches.”

It’s a shift that is coming to life as Shiels climbs what she calls the “mountain” that is Blanche DuBois. Playful and dominant in the early stages of that thwarted seduction scene, she is a world away from the fragile, fluttery woman made famous by Vivien Leigh in Elia Kazan’s 1951 film, which also starred Marlon Brando as Stanley.

“There’s been a lot written about her descent into madness,” says Shiels, “but I feel like she ascends during the play in her relationship to herself and those around her. She does not sulk, she’s back up and surviving.

“The very first line she says to herself in the play is, ‘I’ve got to keep hold of myself,’ and I feel like that is such a great clue for the actor … the situation unravels underneath her, rather than her unravelling. I don’t see her as a mad character. I see her as a woman holding on to her sanity in very difficult circumstances. I think she has a lot of dignity.”

Shiels has become a powerful presence on local stages, following acclaimed performances in plays including Sunday and Girls & Boys, and as one of two actors (with Eryn-Jean Norvill) who took on the extraordinary demands of Kip Williams’ The Picture of Dorian Gray. So how does Blanche – a role once described by Vanity Fair as “something of a Mount Everest in the theatre world” – compare?

“She’s kind of the ultimate role for an actress to take on,” Shiels says. “In terms of the emotional scope … you get to really paint a whole person in the course of three hours. Her performance in life and her interior world - it’s the tension of those two things that I’m dipping in and out of in rehearsals. It’s like an endless investigation into the human condition.

“I’ve been trying to think about who she was as a woman before all of these things happened to her. In some ways, she’s kind of on a loop from her original trauma, which was the death of her young husband.”

The suicide of Blanche’s closeted husband, Allan, following her cruel response to finding him having sex with another man, plagues her and is a possible explanation for her subsequent predatory behaviour. In one of the play’s most troubling scenes, a young collector comes to the door when she is alone in the apartment. She asks him for a light, compares him to a young prince out of The Arabian Nights, and then plants a kiss on his lips, before telling him to run along: “It would be nice to keep you, but I’ve got to be good and keep my hands off children.”

Asked about how she’ll approach the scene, Shiels acknowledges the difficulty.

“I know, as an actor, the circumstances are shocking. Of course it’s problematic ... that scene has always been, in my mind, connected to Allan and there’s a little stage direction that Tennessee Williams puts in about the lightning and she’s fanning herself – it’s kind of an indication that she’s entered the subconscious world, so on the surface, a young collector comes and she seduces him, but the internal world of that moment is something much different for her.

“That’s not going to justify the scene in any way but I do think there’s some inner life that she escapes into and it crosses over with reality. She says, ‘I don’t want realism, I want magic’. The theatre world will make some kind of framework for that to exist in a way that is confronting and sad.”

Blanche is careful to keep her age a secret, but at the time the play was written, she was described as being 30. If that looks jarring in 2024, Shiels points out that “30 in 1947 is very different to now”. Blanche’s efforts to maintain the illusion of desirability – covering a bare lightbulb with a paper lantern, smothering herself in perfume – reinforce the idea that time is not on her side.

When Shiels was offered the role, she assumed there’d been a mistake – “surely I’m playing Stella?” she thought. Recent productions had cast older women in the role: Gillian Anderson was 45 and Cate Blanchett 40 when they played Blanche. So will a modern audience buy the idea of a 30-something woman being, in the parlance of the day, over the hill? Again, Sarks sees contemporary resonances.

“That fear is very real, that you haven’t partnered up, that you haven’t found someone, that maybe your life won’t unfold. But the era is essential to the lack of protection that she has, and it’s also essential to the fact that Stella doesn’t leave at the end of the play. She literally has nowhere else to go.”

Both women, then, are at the mercy of men. Stella’s sexually charged marriage frequently erupts into a level of violence that shocks her sister. In one of Blanche’s most insightful observations, she tells Stella: “Your fix is worse than mine is.” In urging her to leave Stanley, Blanche stands, albeit briefly, as a beacon of clarity.

“A lot of what Blanche says or does feels quite progressive, actually, for 1947,” says Sarks. “It lands in a kind of thrilling way in 2024.

“There’s so much written about what it is for women to be stuck in violent relationships and how difficult it is to leave, but also sometimes how easily they found themselves slipping into that. Lines are drawn, then stepped over and over and over. Excuses are made, denials are made. I’m really interested in unpacking that in a very full and complex way.

A lot of what Blanche says or does feels quite progressive for 1947. It lands in a kind of thrilling way, in 2024.

Anne-Louise Sarks

“The other interesting thing for me about this work is that we are all complicit in the way that we treat each other. We allow it, we excuse it, and that feels like a very timely question – what is my role in relation to what I know is happening? Particularly in that apartment, which is very small, and everyone is living in very cramped quarters, so they can hear what’s happening upstairs and downstairs. We see, we allow, we enable. Our complicity in those acts of aggression and violence really interests me.”

Audiences can expect that what is coming together in that rehearsal room in Southbank will transcend what Sarks refers to as “the reputation ... the myth” of A Streetcar Named Desire.

“We’re trying very much to push that out of the room, to not think about Marlon Brando or Vivien Leigh, or for me, Elia Kazan,” she says. “I directed my first Shakespeare, in maybe 2017, and I remember a similar feeling of contending with everybody’s version of how Shakespeare should be done. There’s a little bit of that sense for me [with Streetcar] but mostly I try to dismiss those thoughts, to just meet the material myself, with my own instincts, which is really all you can ever do.”

Whatever else unfolds in the lead-up to opening night, some things won’t change. Blanche will still be led away, Stella will remain with Stanley, and his violence will continue as others look away. There is no real freedom awaiting the captives of that cramped New Orleans apartment.

But this time around, we will be seeing something new. We will see that survival, no matter how imperfect, is worth fighting for.

A Streetcar Named Desire is at The Playhouse, Arts Centre Melbourne, July 9 - August 17; www.mtc.com.au/plays-and-tickets/whats-on/season-2024/a-streetcar-named-desire/