Sunday at the Theatre: A Streetcar Named Desire

One of the crowning achievements of American drama, A Streetcar Named Desire is a rotund, unassailable text without which it is impossible to understand the theatre of the 20th century. As rich and powerful today as it was when it was premièred more than seventy-five years ago, A Streetcar Named Desire is one of the few plays to have stood the test of time - and one of the even fewer still being performed today - no doubt because of the film version that is firmly imprinted in the memory of audiences the world over.

Tennessee Williams, perhaps the most autobiographical of American playwrights, said that each performance of his plays reflected “the state of my inner world at the time it was written”. This is particularly true of Streetcar, in which he expressed, with brutal honesty, his complex relationship with love and desire. His characters also reflect many aspects of his fascinating personality and those of the people around him. “I’ve always left an area in my characters that can’t be understood. Some mystery should be left in the revelation of character in a play,” said Williams, and he certainly achieved that in this play. My priority as a director has always been to place myself at the service of the story and the actors, and this hat is even more the case with a masterpiece like A Streetcar