Notes on Blanchett's Blanche
By Jonathan Kalb
A Streetcar Named Desire
By Tennessee Williams
BAM Harvey Theater
651 Fulton St., Brooklyn
Box office: (718) 636-4100
Cate Blanchett has not been short of accolades
for her performance as Blanche Dubois in the Sydney Theatre Company
production of A Streetcar Named Desire, directed by Liv Ullmann
and now visiting BAM. The praise has been profuse and prolonged--deservedly
so, as this is surely one of this astonishing actress' most accomplished
and difficult performances. I see no reason to add to the general encomium,
but I would like to offer a few specific observations about it. Once
in a great while, a performer's work is so original and luminous that
it actually alters our understanding of a famous and beloved play. Here
are a few thoughts about Blanchett's achievement.
1. In all previous productions of Streetcar
I'm aware of, Blanche's effete southern-belle act was for the most part
understandable. That is to say, it was pretentious, to be sure, but
also plausible as a species of southern eccentricity--amusing to others
in the play, even persuasive at times, which meant that one could believe
that Blanche might eventually find sanctuary in Williams's "raffish,"
tolerant and bluesy New Orleans. No such possibility exists in Ullmann's
production. Her New Orleans is a bleak, claustrophobic place, a visually
flattened sanctum for blunted sensibilities, where Blanche's belle act
has no social traction whatever. No one believes it from the start,
so she is left looking all the more hopelessly adrift in a remarkably
ugly world. I strongly suspect that this uniquely unsentimental view
came easier to a Norwegian director and Australian actress than it would
to Americans brought up to romanticize everything about the Big Easy.
2. In all previous productions of Streetcar
I'm aware of, the action as a whole was treated as a quasi-Darwinian
struggle for survival between two opposing natures, a quietly epic showdown
between rough and crude Stanley and refined and delicate Blanche that
ended in a sort of sexual death-clutch. This is the legacy of Marlon
Brando, who twisted Tennessee Williams's intentions by stealing the
limelight for Stanley when the play was conceived as a portrait of Blanche,
an exploration of her uniquely fascinating and fantastic nature. Blanchett
restores that original profile to the play, playing a character whose
complexity transcends description as a polar opposite of anyone or anything.
There is nothing weak or unduly subordinate about Joel Edgerton's Stanley,
mind you. Edgerton gives a marvelous performance, but it's clear at
all times that his character is an instrument of the killing environment,
not a co-equal antagonist to Blanche. This is her story, just
as exclusively as if Williams had written it as an Expressionist drama
with only one real character.
3. Notwithstanding her emotional isolation, Blanchett's
Blanche is as nuanced and specific as one could imagine--thoroughly
and heartbreakingly plausible. Unlike Vivien Leigh and countless other
actresses who have luxuriated in Blanche's glamour, Blanchett is wholly
plausible as a former prostitute. One has no trouble believing she was
truly degraded back in her home town, despite her poise and elegance.
She is a veritable skein of underconfidence, never quite comfortable
in her skin or her flashy clothes, and she never flirts with the audience
as if they were surrogates for Mitch, as many other actresses do. Blanchett
speaks and flirts with an offhand self-consciousness suggesting that
even she thinks she's affected. Her haughty and brittle desperation
reminds me of Baudelaire's romantic pontifications: "Nothing that exists
satisfies me. Nature is ugly, and I prefer the monsters of my fancy
to what is positively trivial." There's an inner panic surrounding her
like a dirt cloud, which grows more and more visible as the play goes
on and she wears out her welcome at the Kowalskis'.
4. Blanchett restores terror to the play by performing
Blanche's final downfall as if it were a tragic choice, not the conquest
of a helpless victim. Her fall seems inevitable yet chosen, like those
Greek heroes Nietzsche describes who yowl a defiant "yes" in the face
of the power that crushes them. Blanchett makes Blanche's destruction
seem step-wise, a sort of anti-pilgrim's progress, rather than a chaotic
tumble. She moves methodically from Blanche's flirtations with Mitch
and Stanley, to her ineffectual self-justifications and confessions
with Stella, Mitch and Stanley, to her final "date" with Stanley. Eccentric
and panicked as she is, this woman knows what she's doing at all times,
especially in the so-called "rape scene," which reads here, shockingly,
as an act of courage. For Ullmann and Blanchett, it seems, Blanche voluntarily
surrenders to her attack. Is that choice less touchy for a female director?
Perhaps--it certainly preserves a sense of agency for Blanche while
she is going under. In any case, her madness in the closing scene that
follows feels curiously self-preservative. In the end, Blanchett, her
face not quite a blank, wanders to an isolated corner of the apron as
a final spotlight on her fades to black. Madness for her is clearly
just another sanctuary to hole up in while the world figures out how
to accommodate its misfits. We can all hold our breath for that.