Labonneviveuse
Just another WordPress.com weblogArchive for West End, London
West End Theatre: A Streetcar Named Desire (Donmar Warehouse)
Much like the West End Whingers (see their 28 July 2009 review elsewhere on wordpress), labonneviveuse treasures good sightlines at the theatre. In fact, it could be argued that since fate has compelled her to spend most of the year in the wilds of Canada she treasures good sightlines in a West End theatre even more than they do. In their review, the Whingers congratulated themselves on securing seats in the central section of the stalls. Here’s the other side of the story from someone not so lucky.
Having seen past productions at the Donmar, labonneviveuse anticipated that sightlines could be a difficulty with this production. Tennessee Williams’ script calls, after all, for a curtain to split the stage in half. Unable to secure a seat in the centre stalls, she therefore booked to see it twice, once from a stalls seat on the left of the stage (the audience’s left, that is) and once from a circle seat on the right. She thought this would permit her to see all of the visual details of one half of the production on her first visit, and the visual details of the action occurring on the other half of the stage on her second. She was, as it turns out, dead wrong. The Donmar’s circle is too high for comfortable viewing for anyone seated in it, with the exception, perhaps, of those seated in the front row of the central section. She therefore could not in fact see, on her second visit, what she had entirely missed out on during her first, all of the action involving Stanley Kowalski (played by Elliot Cowan) that takes place at his poker-playing table, which was on the right side of the stage, with a curtain often drawn between her and it.
Though she much admires the Whingers, labonneviveuse does not agree with their conclusion about the staging difficulties of this production, that all theatre ought to be proscenium-arch theatre. (God forbid!) The solution, rather, was for director Rob Ashford to heed the central character’s demand for ‘magic’ over ‘realism’ and find a way of furnishing Williams’ desired ‘curtain’ that would have permitted all spectators of the production to see all aspects of the play. Labonneviveuse knows little about the technical aspects of theatre, but she had thought that theatre technicians delighted in providing such ‘magic.’
To complicate matters further for labonneviveuse as she sat on her perch up in the first row of the circle on the right for her second performance, Jude Law had also chosen to take in the play that night. Labonneviveuse has no difficulties at all with Mr. Law, but she does have some difficulties with his fans, at least as they were embodied that night by the girl beside her for the second half (who appeared out of nowhere after the interval, squeezing herself into the row, it seemed, without having paid for a seat in it). This girl declared herself without the slightest hint of embarrassment to be “on Jude watch.” “Jude watch” involved her propping her arms on the circle’s rail and her hands on her chin so that she could stare across the twenty-five odd feet of space between her and the aforementioned actor of some fame.
With this new fleshy architecture in place, labonneviveuse would have had to risk plunging to the stage in order to have had any hope of seeing the action occurring in the space below her. Since she prefers, at the theatre, to be a spectator rather than a spectacle, she decided it would be best to pretend that she was not in the Donmar Warehouse in 2009, but at the Globe in 1599; the Elizabethans subscribed to the view that one went to the theatre to hear a play rather than to see it.
With the decision to reconcile herself simply to listening to the play, something important about this production became abundantly clear to her. She’d already noticed that Cowan, in what may be an ill-advised gesture of homage to Brando, was working with a confused accent, a strange brew of Chicagoan and Bostonian which seriously impacts his articulacy at key moments. But even if you’re booked for a seat in the last row of the circle, one in the far corner, to boot, take heart: Rachel Weisz has such a nuanced sense of Williams’ language and the ways to render Blanche Dubois’s psychology through it that you’ll feel as if you’re listening to music.
Still, it’s a shame that this production compels all but the privileged few spectators who are in the central section of the stalls to have a partial experience of the play’s visuality. Even as she did her best to reclaim something good out of a lousy situation, by listening to the play on her second visit rather than straining to see it, labonneviveuse could not help but remember wistfully her first viewing the week before, when she was down in the stalls for the last night of previews, and able, at least, to see half of the action – anything that took place in the bedroom – reasonably well. That night, she’d mostly had to look at Elliott Cowan’s back, but in one key instance, her seat in the stall on the lefts had proved a boon.
In the final scene, Cowan twists in his chair so that his back is briefly turned on that segment of the audience (the right stalls) which for the most part has the pleasure of a great view of him throughout. When he turns, he follows Weisz with a wary gaze that conveys his suspicion and fear that even now as Stanley seems to be fully in control in the battle with Blanche, who is about to be removed to a sanitorium, she may still manage one final performance that will let her win the day.
Labonneviveuse was glad to catch that gaze, for with it she had some sense of the kind of detail that she’d been missing out on all night, the detail through which Cowan was making something of his part. That gaze ultimately underscored, however, just how much the staging and blocking for this production shortchange not just the audience (or the greater part of it) but also Cowan. Cowan doesn’t have the chance to convey, or the audience to appreciate, all of the subtle work that would let his performance resonate to the degree that Weisz’s does. Little wonder, then, that writers for the mainstream media have spent most of their type on Weisz. Unlike Cowan, Weisz gets to spend significant time downstage, with her face to the audience. The irony is that, despite Cowan’s stupendous physicality, the frail Weisz gets to dominate the playing space, and the audience’s apprehension. As a result, the sense of the play as a carefully calibrated tango between mighty opposites flags.
The lost opportunities are most obvious perhaps with the play’s two sex scenes. In Ashford’s staging, the audience finds itself staring at Cowan’s muscular back rather than his face. A daring production would have given the actor playing Stanley the opportunity to do something courageous with those moments by letting the audience — all of the audience — see his face.
One final note: it must be said that the actress who plays Stella, Ruth Wilson, is excellent. She brings out the darkest undercurrents of the play in myriad small ways to suggest by the end that it is neither Stanley nor Blanche but Stella-for-Star who is the most dangerous person in the Kowalski household, and that the play itself best understood as a three-hander with a few bit parts.
