Scottish Ballet, A Streetcar Named Desire Review ★★★★★

A Streetcar Named Desire, Tennessee Williams’s best know play, is an intense drama where delusions clash with harsh reality with devastating consequences. It's set in steamy 1940s New Orleans and features unforgettable characters, especially Blanche DuBois, the fading Southern belle with a past, and her brutish brother-in-law Stanley Kowalsky.

Commissioning a dance adaptation of this ferocious play was a gamble, but one that paid off handsomely: 12 years after its premiere, Scottish Ballet’s A Streetcar Named Desire remains fresh, emotionally compelling and visually stunning.

The Belgian-Colombian choreographer Annabelle Lopez Ochoa and director Nancy Meckler devised a format which, while turning the original narrative on its head by following a chronological order, loses none of the play’s gripping power. Add to that simple but eye-catching period designs by Nicola Turner and a cinematic score by Peter Salem and you have a perfect staging for the dancers to tell the story.

That they do with tremendous aplomb, from the ensemble, which displays a thrilling company identity and style, to the soloists, every last one of them giving intelligent, well-rounded interpretations.

Scottish Ballet company in A Streetcar Named Desire. Photo: Andy Ross

On press night principal Marge Hendrick gave a tour de force performance as a flakey, increasingly deluded and alcohol-addled Blanche, always on stage from the moment we saw her as a carefree young woman, reaching out to a light-bulb, fingers fluttering like a moth to a flame, to her final disintegration.The happy bride of handsome Alan (Javier Andreu, a singularly elegant and engaging dancer), the shock of his secret affair with Aaron Venegas’s Jeff and subsequent suicide launches her into an ever more erratic life, haunted by Alan’s bloodied ghost and by visions of an idealised past.

Evan Loudon’s Stanley could up the swagger a notch or two, but he is convincing as the insecure alpha male, who feels threatened by his wife Stella’s love for anybody else, particularly her visiting sister Blanche. His increasingly hostile treatment of Blanche culminates in a graphically violent scene, where he rips off her dress and throws her about before finally raping her. Not easy viewing, yet strangely enthralling.

Claire Souet’s Stella conveyed the ambiguity of the character: cheerful, kind, loving sister, at the same time nurturing an intensely sexual love for Stanley, which trumps everything else. The pas de deux of their first meeting was a marvel of gradual attraction becoming binding, complicated, sensual chemistry.

Thomas Edwards gave us a sympathetic Mitch, Blanche’s hapless suitor, in his own way perhaps as deluded as Blanche herself.

Annabelle Lopez Ochoa is a skilled story-teller, her choreography eloquent, melding different dance languages, from ballet to lindy hop, to provide a never-flagging, vibrant narrative.

Peter Salem’s score is an ingenious collage of original music, period pastiche and street sounds – undistinguishable voices, traffic, church bells and, of course, streetcars – the music for happy scenes, such as Blanche and Alan’s wedding, always containing subtle distortions that hint at disaster to come. It was performed live with great spirit by the Scottish Ballet Orchestre, conducted by Robert Baxter.

Age Guidance: 15+