Maxine Peake has become one of
Manchester’s prime tourist attractions in the last few years. After an
incendiary performance of Shelley’s poem
The Masque Of Anarchy in the city’s
International Festival in 2013, she appeared the following summer at
the Royal Exchange as Hamlet – not a female Hamlet, nor yet a male one,
just an excellent Hamlet. Last year she was the babbling, otherworldly
title character in Caryl Churchill’s
The
Skriker, and now she takes on one of the more conventional
classics of the female theatrical canon: as Blanche DuBois in Tennessee
Williams’
A Streetcar Named Desire.
All of these have been in collaboration with the Exchange’s artistic
director Sarah Frankcom.
Peake and Frankcom never do things simply for effect; whether it’s a
big-picture decision or a fleeting instant, you’re always aware that
there’s a lot behind them. When Peake’s Blanche giggles now and again,
she’s not playing the coquette – although she does that too, and allows
us (though not her marks) to see how desperate it is – but showing just
a flash of rueful self-awareness. And when Frankcom introduces three
new, mute characters as ghostly witnesses to Blanche’s gradual
breakdown, then finally morphs them into the doctor and nurses who take
her away, we infer that the previous three and a quarter hours may have
been Blanche in a fugue state, inwardly reliving the events which have
brought her to the mental institution.
Those events consist of her arrival in New Orleans to share a cramped
apartment with sister Stella and her bullish husband Stanley Kowalski,
ultimately unsuccessful attempts to seduce Stanley’s friend Mitch and
suffering constant abuse from the (rightly) mistrustful Stanley,
culminating in his sexually assaulting her.
Yet for some reason, the elements don’t mesh as tightly this time as
you’d expect. Peake is, as I say, consistently on the ball in terms of
characterisation, but her accent rambles conspicuously. (She’s not
alone: one of the other characters commits the classic
Brit-playing-American error and speaks of “Mardi Grarr”.) Fly Davis’s
set is deliberately minimal and squalid: a couple of mattresses on the
floor, a mini-fridge and a green baize “carpet” on which Stanley’s
poker school plays. But why interrupt the action to clean the place up,
including bringing a vacuum cleaner on for two or three full minutes
directly after the (strangely underdone) rape? That’s not so much a
contrast as a massive deflation.
This is far from the oddest
Streetcar
I’ve seen lately: there was the Young Vic production with Gillian
Anderson a couple of years ago where the entire stage kept revolving.
I’m beginning to think, though, that perhaps unorthodox staging, rather
than solving any of the play’s problems, simply highlights them.
Written for The Lady.