Home Career Theatre
A Streetcar Named Desire (2009)

A Streetcar Named Desire (2009)

Cate Blanchett as: Blanche DuBois

Directed by: Liv Ullmann
Written by: Tennessee Williams
Play run: 1 September – 17 October 2009 (opened on 5 September 2009)
Venue: Roslyn Packer Theatre at Sydney Theatre Company
* The play had its tour in Washington D.C. and New York City in 2009.

Photos | Videos

Downtown New Orleans. In blows Blanche DuBois: a Southern Belle, a fading beauty, a passionate, fragile thing. And she really is in the wrong place.

All her respectability, politenesses and old-fashioned Southern airs and graces provoke the disdain of her sister Stella’s husband. Stanley is a rough, modern man with a coarse sense of humor, no interest in manners and a wild streak.

Her flirting, primping and needy behaviour fix Stanley’s determination to break Blanche and all she stands for. And then she wins the heart of his poker buddy, Mitch.

A Streetcar Named Desire is a compelling and sensuous play which features some of the most memorable characters in theatrical history. The battle between Blanche and Stanley comes to embody nothing less than the battle between tradition and progress itself. The quasi-aristocratic world of plantations, mint juleps and poetry at dusk going head to head with the emerging urban, industrial uberlith of the all-beer, all-poker New America.

Cast:

Cate Blanchett as Blanche DuBois
Joel Edgerton as Stanley Kowalski
Robin McLeavy as Stella Kowalski
Tim Richards as Mitch
Mandy McElhinney as Eunice Hubbell
Michael Denkha as Steve Hubbell
Sara Zwangobani as Negro Woman
Jason Klarwein as Pablo Gonzales

Creatives:

Costume design by Tess Schofield
Set design by Ralph Myers
Lighting design by Nick Schlieper
Sound design by Paul Charlier

Related Images

View more images at the gallery.

Rehearsals; StillRelated Videos

Quotes from Cate Blanchett

“There are pitfalls of stereotyping to be avoided. The film is haunted by clichés so we have tried to get back to truthful connections, pushed by Liv. We have discovered the brutal and emotional.” (Sydney Theatre Company, 2009)
“Robyn [Nevin] had mentioned years ago that she had the rights when we were talking about doing Hedda Gabler and I thought, ‘Oooh, no,’. And then I met Liv in London – and I’d been desperate to work with her – and we were talking about various projects for quite some time and then Andrew [Upton, co-artistic director at the STC] brought up Streetcar. Suddenly the temperature in the room changed.” (Sydney Morning Herald, August 2009)
“We can look at the play through a very different prism. And, perhaps, it’s through Blanche’s prism, because she represents, in a way, what we’ve lost. It’s the death of poetry, the death of idealism, the death of that sort of reality — the validity that someone can actually create something ephemeral and beautiful, that one can’t touch and hold and has no monetary value. They’re very different states that both exist within America, but maybe it’s a time where we can re-evaluate those fragile things that we’ve lost.” (NPR, December 2009)
“For Blanche, the truth is mortal. I don’t believe she is mad. I believe she’s in horrible agony, and I believe she makes her own ending.” (The Washington Post via SMH, November 2009)
“Working with Liv Ullmann was a life-changing experience.” (KK Magazine, December 2020)

Quotes from Others

Liv Ullmann:
— On Cate Blanchett: “As an actress, I played many wonderful roles but I never had the chance to play Blanche. But I know from the bottom of my soul that I would never be the kind of Blanche she is. Cate is making choices that I would never have thought of. Even if I don’t say a word as the director, it is all magically happening in front of me. When I watch Cate, the hairs stand up on my arms. [Her voice softens and her eyes suddenly fill with tears.] I admire Cate tremendously. And if my eyes have tears that is because what she is doing in the rehearsal room is so magical.”
— “I think this play called for her and I do believe — working with her, watching her in the rehearsal — I do believe that some of the very, very best that she has inside, the creative force that goes very very deep within her was allowed to come out by this play.”
— “We had the most wonderful collaboration in the world. Cate Blanchett wanted something from me, and I knew I got something from her. She followed me for many years. We became incredibly close and spoke so personally. We changed the ending of the play and showed the vulnerable person who loses their veil and enters the light as a free person.”
— On when Cate Blanchett was accidentally hit on the head by a radio during a performance: “She was very bloody, and we had to stop the show for insurance reasons, but she was laughing. She wanted to keep going, in spite of the blood all over her costume.”
— On the sold-out BAM run: “You can’t get a ticket. I had to give away my opening-night seats.”
— On the music in the play: “It was very clear when I started to read the play that I had to know more about the blues. Because the truth of the play is the avoidance of truth, and the blues is how you say what you don’t have words for. I also know that Williams, while he wrote the play, was all the time listening to gramophones. Very much the Ink Spots.”
Joel Edgerton:
— On Cate Blanchett: “From another actor’s point of view she has a really exceptional blend of technical skill, intellectual point of view and pure, raw gut instinct that makes her a complete actor.”
Meryl Streep:
— On Cate Blanchett: “That performance was as naked, as raw and extraordinary and astonishing and surprising and scary as anything I’ve ever seen, and it didn’t have anything to do with what clothes she took off, you know what I mean? She took the layers of a person and just peeled them away. I thought I’d seen that play, I thought I knew all the lines by heart, because I’ve seen it so many times, but I’d never seen the play until I saw that performance.”
Jane Fonda:
— “I saw Cate [Blanchett] in “Streetcar Named Desire” on Wednesday night. Liv Ullmann directed it. I will say right here that it was perhaps the greatest stage performance I have ever seen. It is a limited run and all sold out but rumors are that it may come to Broadway and, if so, don’t miss it. Liv’s direction is perfect as is everything about this production which originated in Sydney, Australia where Cate and her husband Andrew have the Sydney Theatre Company. She showed us the unraveling of a fragile woman right before our eyes and did it with not a false moment. I’ve known this was coming cause Liv Ullmann told me about it when she came backstage after my “33 Variations.” So I have had my ear to the ground. I intended to go back stage and hug Cate (we became friends when she and Andrew and their then baby son, Dylan [Dash], came to my ranch a couple years ago while she was filming in New Mexico. They’d planned to have lunch and ended up staying way into the starry night in the hot tub with me, Pat Mitchell and Scott Seydel). I saw her at the same Brooklyn BAM theatre in Hedda Gabler last year and we went to dinner together. What I so love about both Cate and Andrew is they haven’t an ounce of pretense, divahood – just brilliant, hardworking, regular people with a growing family. Anyway I didn’t go back cause the play is three and a half hours long and I had to catch a really early plane to Atlanta. Boo Hiss.”

Selected Reviews

Excerpts from selected reviews.

Sydney Morning Herald (Sydney) — “Endowing her character with a sonorous voice and charm school poise, Blanchett’s Blanche DuBois is very much an actress herself, the star of her own travelling show. “I’ve got to keep a hold of myself,” she says, like a nervous performer about to make her entrance. She soon discovers that antebellum airs and graces do not necessarily cut it for the peanut gallery she must play for.
From that first appearance to her final, shattering exit, Blanchett’s performance is a brilliant demonstration of range and control. Blanche is outlandish, almost camp, yet here you do not doubt her for a moment, and the more she comes apart at the seams, the more grippingly real she becomes. In her final breakdown, Blanchett has her red raw, as if a bucket of boiling water has just been tipped over her head.”
The Washington Post (Washington D.C.) — “If Cate Blanchett’s nerve-shattering turn as Blanche DuBois doesn’t knock the wind out of you, then there is nothing on a stage that can blow you away. What Blanchett achieves in the Sydney Theatre Company’s revelatory revival of “A Streetcar Named Desire” amounts to a truly great portrayal — certainly the most heartbreaking Blanche I’ve ever experienced.
I confess that in the final scene of the 3-hour 15-minute production — when Blanchett’s spectral Blanche is stripped so entirely of the sustaining illusions of life that she looks as if all her blood’s been drained away — I lost it. In the harrowing moment before the asylum doctors lead Blanche away, she makes a frantic last break for it, running and hiding under the bed in Stella and Stanley’s room. Watching as Blanchett at last limply submits (over the wrenching sobs of erstwhile beau Mitch), you grasp fully the inevitability of Blanche’s demise: She has been lost since a day long ago in her native Mississippi, where the horrific end to an intense, impossible love spurred her to a self-induced doom.
The Norwegian actress Liv Ullmann, renowned for her collaborations with the director (and father of her child) Ingmar Bergman on some of his most important films, was recruited to direct Tennessee Williams’s seminal tragedy for its debut in Sydney in September. As she finds in the piece both poetry and unexpected humor, Ullmann proves a formidable hire.
…It is in the pitiable final scene, when Blanche cannot muster the strength to put on a dress at all, that Blanchett is at her most astonishing peak. Unmasked, her Blanche stumbles across the stage, exhausted, vanquished, finished.”
Vogue (Washington D.C.) — “And though much of the play rests on Williams’s ravishing and brutal way with words, Ullmann has an almost cinematic eye for framing moments. At one point, after fruitlessly ordering Blanchett to turn off the radio, Edgerton stalks across the room to do the job himself. Slouched in front of it, her legs spread suggestively, Blanchett defiantly blocks his way. The look that passes between them as he looms above her tells us everything that we need to know about what’s at stake. Later, as Blanchett lies curled in a pose that evokes the infamous poster from the Williams-Kazan film collaboration Baby Doll, listening to a recording of Schumann’s “Kinderszenen” (“Scenes from Childhood”), we sense her slipping away as she wills herself back into the past. Blanchett charts every nuance of her character’s downward spiral and captures each of her seemingly endless contradictions with dazzling facility. But her real achievement lies in making us feel that we are watching a real person flailing to keep her head above the rising tide.
When, toward the end of the play, she says, “I want to rest,” her voice and her eyes and the slope of her shoulders betray a weariness so deep that we are not surprised that she has no fight left when Stanley rapes her. At times, the raw honesty and ferocious need can become hard to watch, as evidenced on opening night during a scene in which Blanche tries to seduce a teenage boy. Just as Blanchett seemed to have him in her clutches, a distinctly Australian male voice in the audience called out, “Don’t do it, mate,” earning a ripple of relieved laughter. But no one made a sound during the final, almost unbearable moments, when Blanchett was led to her future on the arm of a dour psychiatric-hospital doctor. In most productions, the character is dressed once again in her Southern finery, believing that she’s about to sail away with a gentleman admirer, lost forever in a world of psychotic fantasy. Here, Blanchett takes her leave without even that consolation—conquered, empty, stripped of illusion, hope, and humanity, she is led away barefoot, wearing only a white slip, her scrubbed face a hollow mask of what once was. Standing in the spot where we first saw her, caught in an unsparing column of light, she looks like a ghost”
New York Times (New York) — “The lady who lives for illusion has never felt more real. Playing that immortal bruised Southern lily Blanche DuBois, in Liv Ullmann’s heart-stopping production of “A Streetcar Named Desire” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Cate Blanchett soars spectacularly on the gossamer wings of fantasies that allow her character to live with herself. But you never doubt for a second that this brave, silly, contradictory and endlessly compelling woman is thoroughly and inescapably of this world.
Though it is the place she would least like to be most of the time, Blanche DuBois has been pulled gently and firmly down to earth by Ms. Blanchett and Ms. Ullmann, who guarantee that she stays there. Most interpretations I’ve seen of Blanche, Tennessee Williams’s greatest contribution to dramatic portraiture, ride the glistening surface of the character’s poetry, turning Blanche into a lyric, fading butterfly waiting for the net to descend.
What Ms. Blanchett brings to the character is life itself, a primal survival instinct that keeps her on her feet long after she has been buffeted by blows that would level a heavyweight boxer. This traveling production out of Sydney, Australia, which runs at the Harvey Theater through Dec. 20, features a very creditable adversary for its heroine in Joel Edgerton as Stanley Kowalski, Blanche’s brutish brother-in-law. But the real struggle here is between Blanche and Blanche, which means that nobody wins.
Except, I might add, audiences, who are likely to find themselves identifying with disturbing closeness with a character who has often before seemed too exotic, too anachronistic, too fey to remind you of anyone you knew personally. Ms. Blanchett’s Blanche is always on the verge of falling apart, yet she keeps summoning the strength to wrestle with a world that insists on pushing her away. Blanche’s burden, in existential terms, becomes ours. And a most particular idiosyncratic creature acquires the universality that is the stuff of tragedy.
Ms. Ullmann and Ms. Blanchett have performed the play as if it had never been staged before, with the result that, as a friend of mine put it, “you feel like you’re hearing words you thought you knew pronounced correctly for the first time.”
This newly lucid production of a quintessentially American play comes to us via a Norwegian director, best known as an actress in the brooding Swedish films of Ingmar Bergman, and an Australian movie star, famous for impersonating historical figures like Elizabeth I and Katharine Hepburn. Blessed perhaps with an outsider’s distance on an American cultural monument, Ms. Ullmann and Ms. Blanchett have, first of all, restored Blanche to the center of “Streetcar.”
The genteel belle, the imperious English teacher, the hungry sensualist, the manipulative flirt: no matter which of these aspects is in ascendancy, Ms. Blanchett keeps them all before us, in a range of voices that seem to come from different compartments of the soul. The layers that she packs into single words are astonishing: “He-e-y,” for example, stretched into several syllables of longing as she speaks to a confounded young man, or “Eureka” as a cry not of discovery but defeat.”
The New Yorker (New York) — “Blanchett, with her alert mind, her informed heart, and her lithe, patrician silhouette, gets it right from the first beat. “I’ve got to keep hold of myself,” Blanche says, her spirits sinking with disappointment at the threadbare squalor of the one-room apartment her sister shares with her working-class husband. “Only Poe! Only Mr. Edgar Allan Poe!—could do it justice! Out here I suppose is the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir!” she drawls to Stella, flapping her long birdlike fingers in the direction of the window and the railroad tracks beyond. Blanchett doesn’t make the usual mistake of foreshadowing Blanche’s end at the play’s beginning; she allows Blanche a slow, fascinating decline. And she is compelling both as a brazen flirt and as an amusing bitch. When Stella explains that Stanley is Polish, for instance, Blanche replies, “They’re something like the Irish, aren’t they? Only not so—highbrow.” It’s part of Blanchett’s great accomplishment that she makes Blanche’s self-loathing as transparent and dramatic as her self-regard. She hits every rueful note of humor and regret in Williams’s dialogue. In one desperate scene, in which Blanche explains her sordid past to Stanley’s friend Mitch (Tim Richards), who has been disabused of his romantic interest in her, she takes a slug of Southern Comfort. “Southern Comfort!” she exclaims. “What is that, I wonder?” Dishevelled, sitting on the floor by the front door, she fesses up to Mitch. “Yes, I had many intimacies with strangers,” she says, in a voice fatigued by heartbreak. I don’t expect to see a better performance of this role in my lifetime.”

Trivia & Facts

The play toured at Kennedy Center in Washington D.C. from 30 October to 21 November 2009, and Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York City from 27 November to 20 December 2009.
Liv Ullmann was supposed to direct Cate Blanchett in a film adaption of A Doll’s House but fell through due financing, Cate suggested that they work together in theatre. They had met in London and A Streetcar Named Desire came up on their conversation, it was Andrew Upton, Cate’s husband and co-artistic director at Sydney Theatre Company who suggested it.
When Robyn Nevin was artistic director at STC, she got the rights for the play, and she had always had Cate Blanchett in mind to play Blanche.
Liv Ullmann’s US directorial debut in theatre.
Liv Ullmann took course in blues music with a Tufts University professor as part of preparation for the play.
The paintings of Edward Hopper inspired the visual look of the play.
Performances in Sydney, Washington D.C. and New York immediately sold out even before they opened.
Cate Blanchett won Best Actress in a Play at 2009 Sydney Theatre Awards and Outstanding Lead Actress, Non-Resident Production at 2010 Helen Hayes Awards.
Tim Richards won Best Supporting Actor and Paul Charlier won Best Sound Design at 2009 Sydney Theatre Awards.
Cate Blanchett was accidentally hit at the back of her head by a prop radio by Joel Edgerton during a scene which caused her head to bleed out, she still continued the scene until the show was announced cancelled. She was able to get back on stage the next day to perform.
Some of the actors who went to see the play when it toured in the US: Jane Fonda, Meryl Streep, Charlotte Rampling, John Turturro, Natalie Portman, Kate Winslet, Sam Mendes, Anne Hathaway, Alan Cumming, and composer, Philip Glass.