Never did see this version, have you? Meanwhile, here is more on Cate Blanchett’s performance as Blanche DuBois from The New Yorker’s theater critic, John Lahr:
Blanche is the Everest of modern American drama, a peak of psychological complexity and emotional range, which many stars have attempted and few have conquered. Of the performances I’ve seen in recent years, Jessica Lange’s lacked theatrical amperage, Natasha Richardson’s was too buff, and Rachel Weisz’s, in this year’s overpraised Donmar Warehouse production in London, was too callow. The challenge for the actress taking on Blanche lies in fathoming her spiritual exhaustion, her paradoxical combination of backbone and collapse. Blanche has worn herself out, bearing her burden of guilt and grief, and facing down the world with a masquerade of Southern gaiety and grace. She is looking—as Williams himself was when he wrote the play—for “a cleft in the rock of the world that I could hide in.”
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.
Lahr is less enthralled with the rest of the production. Still, sounds like an experience, don’t it?
