A Streetcar Named Desire, review: A heartstopping revival that grips with the intensity of a bad dream

The last time the Irish actor Paul Mescal trod the boards on the London stage was his debut over here five years ago – when he appeared in a revival of O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars at the Lyric Hammersmith.

None of the main reviews even mentioned him. His Bafta-winning success in the 2020 BBC adaptation of 'Normal People', which saw him become an instant household name, courtesy of his smouldering turn as Connell, a sensitive soul in an athletic body, has changed all that.

He’s a hot property and attention is duly riveted on how the 26-year-old fares in Tennessee Williams’s masterpiece - in the role that made an overnight sensation of Marlon Brando back in 1947: the brusque, brutish, beer-swilling Stanley Kowalski.

It’s perhaps no surprise that the run has already sold out. And that’s testament, too, to the gilded track-record of director Rebecca Frecknall (flush from success with Cabaret) and the innate curiosity value of her Blanche DuBois, a role taken (after Lydia Wilson suffered an injury during the rehearsal period) by Patsy Ferran, who had award-laden success with Frecknall in Summer and Smoke another Williams play at the Almeida in 2018.

Can Mescal cross continents and convince as a louche, poker-playing New Orleanian? Ferran as the faded Southern belle who seeks refuge with her sister Stella (Stanley’s wife) follows in the glamorous footsteps this century of Gillian Anderson, Rachel Weisz and Glenn Close.

Both actors are seen to tremendous effect, though, in a stripped-back austerity Streetcar that positions the action, with little furniture, on an exposed square platform, with members of the ensemble sometimes gazing in from the side-lines - no hiding place.

Mescal sheds the boy next door tenderness we fell for on TV in a performance that glints with muscular fixity and a mindset of suppressed fury; it’s as if his charm instantly wears off, and he alights on the interloper as the lightning-rod for inchoate resentments. He violently yowls, closes in to physically intimidate, shockingly socks his wife in the jaw and prowls scarily on all fours, mimicking a tiger, in the notorious show-down scene (rather sanitised for the film) of sexual predation.

When he takes his top off here, there’s no invitation to eroticism. If carnal desire wins out over social disgust in Williams's book, disgust is properly invited. The interpretative loss is of charm and the kind of redeeming, suppressed soulfulness that Brando hinted at. But it works, well.

For her part, Ferran fashions Blanche as we’d expect her to – an enervating but captivating round of breathless neurosis, complete with fluttering hand-movements, and a mixture of kooky affability and shrewd calculation. Barefoot beneath a spartan light-bulb, she’s palpably haunted by the figure of the boy she loved who died of (homo)sexual shame, and flirts in a quietly frantic way with Dwane Walcott’s impressively stolid ‘Mitch’. I’d like a little more in the way of airy affectation, but there’s a nice needle-sharp quality to her mutually recriminatory relations with Stella (Anjana Vasan oscillating in loyalty).

It's hard to reinvent Streetcar; the evening falls short of Summer and Smoke’s revelations, but grips with the intensity of a bad dream; drums pound feverishly away, and the pain is relayed of a lonely life spiralling beyond last chance saloon. The final scene, which shows forceful restraint being applied to the carted-away heroine is heart-stopping.

Until Feb 4. Tickets: 020 7359 4404; almeida.co.uk