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A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams
Directed by Ian Cairncross for Sunshine Community Theatre
Reviewed by George Bissett 1994
Streetcar Named Desire? Well you'd need a good Blanche. And the rest of the main characters need to have a good understanding of what they're doing. And the set's a bit of a bitch on a small stage. And twelve scenes is murder on the tech people.
Well, Sunshine managed to line up all of the ducks for this production. There were some weaker points, but the main things worked, and worked well.
As we walked into the theatre, we were struck by the set, which was quite complex, but contained all of the necessary parts in defiance of our school geometry lessons. This complexity could have led to masking problems and out-and-out confusion for the audience, but director Ian Cairncross had carefully moved the cast so that this never happened. I was very comfortable with this set and I think all of the people who created it, and subsequently, lit and stage-managed it, deserve high praise.
For some reason, it is very easy to be critical of Southern US accents, and this play was no exception. The main characters seemed to be doing their best to find middle ground between "real" New Orleans and what they knew they could achieve. This care was not as evident in the supporting cast and it sometimes grated but never in a major way.
"The Blanche": How can you review Streetcar without talking about "The Blanche?" Sunshine's Blanche, Lynne Sutton, was good. She annoyed and irritated from the moment she wandered on to the set. She had all of the mannerisms that were needed, and perhaps a few more for good measure. She went madder gradually, almost imperceptibly, until, at the end, you suddenly realised how much the character had altered from the start to the finish. And she looked and dressed the part! Costumes were all well handled in this production.
Kris Weber as Stella Kowalski was also very good and gave us a performance which indicated that she understood her character very well. The same could be said for Jason Buckley as Harold Mitchell.
Stanley Kowalski played by Peter Prenga was a good "classic" Stanley. There seems to be a Brando effect on this character. Every performance I have seen has Stanley playing the role much as Brando did and this causes problems whereby the audience do not get a chance to sympathise with Stanley enough. In the scene were Stanley is telling of Blanche's indiscretions, it is important that we believe him, but, because of the way he is played early on, it is very hard to do so. Just one reviewer's opinion. But, as I said, Peter gave us a good, classic Stanley.
Supporting cast were adequate to good, I particularly liked Paul Rourke as the Young Collector who made the best of a tiny role, and Bradley Richardson as Steve Hubbell.
Scene changes were, at times, a bit slow, unnecessarily so in my opinion but the play never seemed to drag. In my experience, this play does have a tendency to drag in the hands of the inexperienced so I congratulate Ian Cairncross and all of the people at Sunshine for a very good production of a very difficult play.
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