CONTEMPORARY ARTS
THE THEATRE
A Streetcar Named Desire. By Tennessee Williams. (Aldwych.) MARRIED in her teens to a young poet who, when she discovered him to be a pervert, blew the back of his head out: tethered there- after by family duty to the untidy deathbeds of an unspecified number of old ladies: and made in due course heiress to an impoverished estate in Louisiana whose dimensions have been progressively re- duced by what she describes as the "epic fornications " of her forebears (the adjective must presumably be taken to have its usual Hollywood connotation of "expensive"), Blanche du Bois cannot be said to have made an auspicious start in life.
Her ultimate fate, of which we are the witnesses, is miserable in the extreme. "A very different kettle of fish from Rookery Nook," remarked my neighbour at the Aldwych, and there is no disputing the justice of this observation. Expelled from her home town for too overt promiscuity, Miss du Bois migrates to the mean apart- ment in New Orleans where her younger sister lives with a husband of Polish-American extraction. He is a very virile man, with exceptionally bad manners ; and when he overhears Miss du Bois, in one of her rare passages of understatement, describe him as "common" he takes against her. The lady's nerves are bad already, and we can see that her reason is, if not tottering, liable to do so at any moment. When her brother-in-law, while waiting for news of the birth of his first child, (a) does her out of a husband by revealing to the gentleman in question the details of her scabrous past, (b) puts on the pyjamas which he bought for his wedding night and (c) rapes her, Miss du Bois goes round the bend. One can hardly accuse her of making a fuss about nothing.
This synthetic and rather pretentious play is transfigured, as far as such a process is feasible, by the acting of Miss Vivien Leigh in the principal part. She does not, it is true, move us deeply ; and the carnality which is such a feature of her past is almost too success- fully concealed by her flimsy though elaborate facade of respect- ability. But her acting is wonderfully varied and perceptive and, although a certain hollowness in the play makes it impossible for us to be touched by the fact of her approaching madness, we watch with a fascinated interest her portrayal of its approach. Mr. Bonar Coileano, called on to present a character almost as over-simplified and two-dimensional as those daemonic supermen whose exploits in strip cartoons make such a strong appeal to the imagination of the American male, does so to perfection ; and Miss Renee Asherson brings truth as well as warmth to her portrait of his brutalised but ever-loving wife. Sir Laurence Olivier's production is masterly ; and if the play will hardly strike London as the chef d'oeuvre .which it has long seemed to New York, this is not the first occasion on which a transatlantic passage has resulted in the disinflation of a dramatist, whichever side of the ocean he started from. PETER FLEMING. PETER FLEMING.
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