A Streetcar Named Desire provides a nerve-jangling journey into the human condition

Dylan Janse van Rensburg as Stanley Kowalski and Sarah Wolhuter as Stella, his wife. (Photo: Claude Bernardo)

By Keith Bain

19 Aug 2024

An intrepid student production in Cape Town proves that, almost 80 years on, the masterful Tennessee Williams drama has lost none of its ability to shine a light on the cruellest paradoxes of human nature.

Beautiful as Tennessee Williams’s dialogue is, it’s often what goes unsaid in A Streetcar Named Desire that most deftly captures the tragic ironies of being human.

Whether it’s the way actor Dylan Janse van Rensburg’s Stanley Kowalski slouches against the furniture, or how he leans over his food like a Neanderthal as if protecting it from some other cave dweller. It’s there in the way he swigs his beers and barks orders across a room. It’s in his loping gait and in the menace he exudes whenever he’s in a foul mood.

Certainly it’s in the way he lays eyes upon his sister-in-law, Blanche DuBois, taking her in with a controlling, even predatory gaze.

It’s also there in the manner with which Blanche, played to perfection by Emily Child, descends into a make-believe world of airs and graces, in order to convey the complexities of a woman who is barely keeping it together.

Even Janse van Rensburg’s broad, frequently exposed shoulders possess some kind of unsayable meaning, utter some unspoken truth about the fragile fabric of life, the tenuous and shaky foundations upon which human connections are established and this strange thing we call civilisation is built. It’s there, too, in the way this young, running-on-instinct actor keeps Stanley’s most primitive and bestial energies simmering ever-so-slightly below the surface of his handsome, irrefutably masculine exterior.

Presumably the result of a hard upbringing coupled with some kind of undiagnosed wartime PTSD, Stanley’s truth quivers and quakes constantly under his skin. It stays dormant until he is suddenly and inexplicably set off, enraged by the slightest provocation.

Just as much as he’s driven to violence by some indescribable madness, he’s equally capable of expressing almost mournful regret, conveying emotions that can barely be put into words but which he manages to get out in the form of guttural utterances, or with that one single word – “Stella!” – screamed, finally, into an upstage abyss of loneliness and longing.

As much as you kind of hate Stanley by the time theatre’s most famous one-word cry for attention is yelled, though, you somehow cannot help but feel something of his despair, for you’ve been granted a window into the soul of a man just as broken as Blanche, the woman he instinctively despises and whose destruction he steadily engineers.

Emily Child as Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire. (Photo: Claude Bernardo)

It was an icy-cold afternoon at Cape Town’s Theatre on the Bay when I watched this production of Streetcar, with a special matinee audience of 70 schoolchildren. Save for the occasional bouts of laughter and audible gasps of shock and awe, the silence was staggering, such was the sense of an audience utterly captivated.

It’s been 77 years since Marlon Brando and Jessica Tandy first sent shockwaves through Broadway’s Ethel Barrymore Theatre with their respectively electric performances as Stanley and Blanche in this soul-shattering play. The crowd watching the Elia Kazan-directed production that night in December 1947 applauded for half an hour, and Brando was suddenly on his way to becoming a legend.

Not only widely regarded as having transformed theatre, Streetcar also went on to alter the relationship Hollywood had with censorship — the movie tested audiences’ capacity for adult themes like nothing before. Bizarrely, when Brando played Stanley in Kazan’s critically acclaimed film adaptation in 1951, he was the only one of the film’s four main actors not awarded an Oscar.

Watching the movie today, it seems a travesty. His performance is masterful, and Brando was only just getting started.

Perhaps it was the character rather than the performance, though, which lost him the Academy Award (to Humphrey Bogart): Stanley Kowalski is one of those characters you struggle to forgive. On the one hand, there’s his charm, his raw honesty and his physical likability. But he is, in the worst possible way, responsible for tearing his lost, fragile, despairing sister-in-law to pieces.

Dylan Janse van Rensburg as Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire. (Photo: Claude Bernardo)

Nervous third wheel

It is of course this nervous third wheel, Blanche, whose character meltdown provides the crux of the play’s action. Freshly blown in from Mississippi and utilising various aristocratic airs to cling to a kind of imagined social superiority that is as tragically fake as her rhinestone tiara, it’s one of those parts every actress dreams of.

From the moment actress Emily Child walks onto stage with her suitcase and look of dismay and surprise at her reduced circumstances, she commands our attention with her fascinating depiction of a woman who is already half-broken and who, over the course of two hours, grows ever more brittle until she is finally ready to snap like a twig.

Chris Weare’s direction captures all the under-the-surface tension while ensuring that the action is alive and vital throughout; even in the seemingly calmest moments, there’s vigour and robustness. The stage heaves with energy, whether in its suggestions of the bohemian nightlife and ribald goings on associated with the New Orleans French Quarter in which the Kowalskis — Stella and Stanley — live in their cramped downstairs apartment, or via the macho posturing of a booze-fuelled poker game played around a small kitchen table, or the sexual tension that’s constantly bubbling up.

Dylan Janse van Rensburg as Stanley Kowalski and Sarah Wolhuter as his wife Stella. (Photo: Claude Bernardo)

Desire is everywhere and not only in the Kowalskis’ bedroom. Each time their landlords, Eunice (Noa Duckitt) and Steve (Benjamin Stannard), head up the wrought-iron stairwell to their apartment, you know it’s to be followed by either domestic violence or sex or both.

A similar confluence of frustrated animal rage and sexual desire permeates the air molecules between Stanley and the pair of sisters he finds himself shacked up with. Each time he loses his temper with his wife, Stella, you anticipate the inevitable make-up sex that’s soon to follow. And every time Stanley so much as glances at Blanche, you kind of feel him sizing her up, peeling off not only her precious clothes and jewels and furs, but her very skin, as if he possesses some instinctual ability to see into her soul.

On the receiving end of Stanley’s animal-like stares, Blanche seems like a bird unable to quench its thirst. It’s this fine line between desire and disgust that Williams uses to string us along, and Emily Child sure knows how to squeeze every bit of nuance and drama from the precarious situation Blanche finds herself in.

Sasha Duffy adds a soothing singing voice to the taut action in A Streetcar Named Desire. (Photo: Claude Bernardo)

Given the stature of Child’s performance, it comes as little surprise that the student actors sharing the stage with her are able to rise to the occasion and deliver such engaging performances. Janse van Rensburg, who shone as Melchior in the musical, Spring Awakening, earlier this year, brings a youthful rawness to the role, while also managing to capture something of Stanley’s vulnerability; there’s an almost puppy-dog lovability that dwells within him, lost somewhere inside the brutish, terrifying macho-man.

Sarah Wolhuter as Stella, Blanche’s sister and Stanley’s long-suffering, devoted and pregnant wife, expresses just the right combination of smarts and self-deceit to capture her character’s conflict in a solid, wonderfully watchable performance. She conveys that schism within that sees her returning to Stanley’s arms, again and again, even when she knows her physical desire and that mysterious thing called love might ultimately destroy her.

Read more: Intimate and full of humanity, Pieces of Me is food for the soul in a ritual of storytelling

Also a delight to watch is Jayden Dickson as the tall, lanky, permanently perplexed and rather unworldly Harold Mitchell, who walks out of the bathroom, sets eyes on Blanche, and is instantly smitten. As the two embark on a somewhat wishy-washy courtship, Dickson increasingly reveals Mitch’s confusion as he wrestles with the paradox of his own feelings — he lusts after a woman from whom he also expects chasteness.

A lovely touch, too, is a series of musical cameos by Sasha Duffy, who sings with a natural and pure voice from the edge of the stage. I’d have liked to have heard more from her; aside from helping to set the mood and tone and period of the play, her singing also offers some breathing space between the taut emotional action unfolding in the Kowalski household.

Dylan Janse van Rensburg as Stanley Kowalski and Sarah Wolhuter as Stella, his wife. (Photo: Claude Bernardo)

Conveys the claustrophobia

That household, and the world it represents, is beautifully captured by Niall Griffin’s design. His set gets it right to convey the claustrophobia of the Kowalskis’ tiny home — a perfect environment in which to generate all that unspoken, pent-up sexual tension — and also capture the kind of bohemian, almost wayward, living conditions of the Quarter. It’s evidently a place gone to seed and yet filled with life — and brimming with sex and foreboding.

Griffin’s costumes, too, are spot on, an instant portal to another era.

While this is, technically, a student production, it is immaculately executed; both vastly entertaining and genuinely heartbreaking. And, at the centre of it all, is professional actress Emily Child’s guest performance as the lonely, frightened and increasingly unhinged Blanche. Child is magisterial in this show, to the extent that when she utters her famous final line about relying on the kindness of strangers, you feel yourself shatter into a million pieces.

Give yourself a moment, though, because you’ll likely shatter again when you hear Stanley’s famously plaintive cry for his precious Stella. With that bleak, mournful scream of his, you can’t help but recognise that Stanley Kowalski is an animal trapped in the body of a man. Which is of course the irony of the human condition that each and every one of us must endure. DM

A Streetcar Named Desire is playing at Theatre on the Bay in Cape Town until 24 August.

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Nervous third wheel

Conveys the claustrophobia