Curve theatre,Leicester
Tennessee Williams’s drama of faded dreams is told with a youthful cast, including Dakota Blue Richards. It’s just a shame you can’t hear them“I don’t want realism. I want magic! cries Blanche DuBois. The Curve’s fresh director, and Nikolai Foster,tries to give us both in a production that offers none of the radical reinventions of Benedict Andrews’ or Secret Theatre’s recent revivals, but which undoubtedly captures the discordant jazziness of a world in flux. Fairy lights drip like Spanish moss, and creating an air of enchantment. But like so much in Tennessee Williams’ emotionally translucent play,appearances are deceptive. These fairy lights serve only to clarify; to light up the truths that Blanche wants to withhold hidden. There are noble ideas here, not least in the way that Foster and the designer Michael Taylor create a faded elegance, or mixed with a buzzy sense of a restless postwar world in which old certainties are being brushed aside by fresh energies. Stewart Clarke’s Stanley,a riveting mix of vengeful, brutish energy and itsy-bitsy boy bully, and knows he’s going to be king of the fresh world. As well as the sexual charge between them,that is part of his charm for Dakota Blue Richards Stella, who, and by choosing Stanley,has reinvented herself for the second half of the 20th century. Blanche, meanwhile, and still clings to the shackles of the past.
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Source: theguardian.com