A Blanche radiating all the colours of drama
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destitute Blanche arrives at the cramped apartment in working-class New Orleans shared by her sister Stella and her husband Stanley. Nalini Chetty’s Stella is perfect, quiet and accepting, happily pregnant, yet still well able to articulate, explain and defend the choices she has made.
Matthew Trevannion somehow – with great subtlety – creates a Stanley who is both appalling in his bullying machismo and violence, and yet deeply human in his resistance to the snobbery that has Blanche dismiss him as a “Polack” and an “ape”; and Keith Macpherson is magnificent as Mitch, Stanley’s kind middle-aged friend, who briefly and poignantly becomes Blanche’s beau.
The action swirls seamlessly forward on Pitlochry’s beautiful revolving stage, which might have been built for the curving spiral staircase and shifting domestic spaces of Emily James’s fine set.
And with sound design and music by Pippa Murphy to complete the picture, this Streetcar emerges as a nearflawless production of a great 20th-century classic; not overtly innovative, but full of insights drawn from our own time, and absolutely true to the living spirit of Williams’s great drama.
Johnny Mcknight’s Meet Me At The Knob, this week’s A Play, a Pie and a Pint show, bills itself as a “raucous new musical” set in 1920s Glasgow, when a band of gangsters in drag, known as the White Hats, used to rule the Broomielaw, extracting hush money from “respectable citizens” who sought homosexual encounters there. The play certainly has its moments of camp and raunchy comedy, as a hotel encounter between a rent boy and a senior judge is interrupted by a ferociously dragged-up Darren Brownlie, in the role of ruthless gangster queen Liz.
The comedic structure of the plot slightly belies the intensity of the feelings it unleashes, though, as Liz rages and mourns – often through powerful and moving songs by Novasound – over the long history of injustices done to “beautiful boys” punished by a legal system itself riddled with corruption and sexual hypocrisy. The mood is often as much Tennessee Williamsstyle lyricism and longing as raucous comedy; and if there’s a feeling of a slightly bigger subject here than can easily be encompassed in a 55-minute lunchtime play, there’s also a huge sense of dramatic, musical and theatrical potential, beautifully sustained, in Jemima Levick’s production, by Darren Brownlie, Tom Urie and Dylan Wood.
A Streetcar Named Desire is in repertoire at Pitlochry Festival Theatre until 30 September; Meet Me At The Knob is at Oran Mor, Glasgow, ends today