I have a confession to make, I had never seen A Streetcar Named Desire before Saturday.  Obviously I was familiar with the famous images from the film with Brando in his white t-shirt and Leigh a vision of fragile beauty but I’d never actually sat down and watched either the film or the play in its entirety.  Upon finding out out that Scottish Ballet was to turn the story into a ballet I was faced with the choice of watching it to get an idea of the storyline or wait and view it with fresh eyes.

I waited… and I’m glad I did.

It’s a tricky skill to convey a storyline through movement, music and set as opposed to words and actions but Scottish Ballet achieved it admirably.  The choreography, sound score, set and costume design all pulled together to tell the story of Blanche, a southern girl who never quite recovered from a lost love and whose demise is encouraged by the actions of her beloved sister’s partner, Stanley.

Never ones to shy away from the hard-hitting Scottish Ballet tackle issues including alcoholism, depression, paranoia, emotional, mental and physical abuse and present it to a matinee crowd in an unflinching manner.

Designer Niki Turner made the set and costumes work as hard as the dancers.  Utilising wooden boxes to transform the stage from an impressive mansion in the Deep South to a lively and dark city at night, a bowling alley filled with tension and rivalries, a desparate hotel room and finally the sparse home of Stella and Stanley.  The blocks, moved by the dancers, are built and rebuilt on stage mirroring the events of Blanche’s life where her world is constantly being repaired and broken.

The costumes are equally hardworking, with many costume changes taking place onstage with the assistance of other dancers.  Blanche’s colour scheme of pink, ranging from the palest blush at the start of her story to the deepest, almost blood-like, fuschia at the peak of her mental anguish reflects her purity becoming lost as the events of her tortured life take their toll and she becomes her most vulnerable.

Similarly Stella’s colour scheme of blue becomes darker as her pregnancy develops and she becomes vulnerable to Stanley’s persuasions.  Finally both females are returned to their first colours as Stella reluctantly has Blanche committed to a mental institution.

For the corps de ballet, who were onstage a vast amount of the time acting as a Greek chorus, helping to progress the story and change the set, females were dressed in pastel silk slips with a variety of accessories to indicate different characters and events and the male dancers were dressed largely in slacks with white vests, occasionally adding a waistcoat or bowling shirt to reference different points in time.

Musically, the sound score combined the very sparse with a great selection of 1940s Jazz and Ella Fitzgerald’s ‘It’s Only a Paper Moon’, whose lyrics are referenced by the use of a paper lantern to decorate Blanche’s bedroom in Stella & Stanley’s home touchingly hung by Mitch as he tries to impress Blanche not realising she is already beyond help.

Peter Salem’s commissioned sound score manages to combine the essence of the era with dark sections of jarring notes that sound much more contemporary than the rest, allowing for the choreography to also incorporate the traditional with the contemporary.

With the set design, costumes and music all reflecting the era and the location without being beholden to it, Annabelle Lopez Ochoa’s choreography was also able to flit in and out of different styles and eras incorporating fairly traditional male, female duets with flexed feet, splayed hands and contractions most commonly found during the corps de ballet sections.  The playfulness of the wedding scene and the late night cabaret reminded me of Matthew Bourne’s style of choreography, very character driven, with each dancer having a slight variation on the movement, and highly musical.  Later, as Blanche’s demise takes her to a seedy hotel where she seeks company with various men the choreography becomes much more fluid with cartwheels, lifts and turns being performed by both male and female dancers to create a whirlwind on stage that engulfs Blanche.

Similarly, when Blanche retreats into fantasy in her fuschia dress we see the action on stage speed up as more and more dancers appear to confuse her, passing her from person to person without care until the quivering of the moth returns us to the opening scene.

Each group of dancers has their own movement vocabulary, Blanche and Stella have moments of real fragility and dance en pointe for the majority of the performance while the bowling teams whoop and cheer with much more casual, relaxed movements denoting a carefree attitude.  Stanley’s friends are shown to be very macho with exaggerated stances, coded card dealings and their relentless teasing of Mitch and his hat.

The Mexican Flower Sellers, who appear throughout the performance at times when Blanche’s husband Alan comes to mind, are often in deep plies.  Reminiscent of Martha Graham in dance style and Frida Kahlo in imagery, they are dressed in long black cloaks with colourful cummerbunds and are in soft shoes, made to look like bare feet giving them an ethereal quality despite their dark colour scheme.

The sensual male duet between Alan and his lover is almost unheard of in dance.  Classical and to a certain extent contemporary dance often shies away from same sex duets, particularly male duets expressing love or passion so this section of the ballet really sets Scottish Ballet’s interpretation apart paving the way to further harrowing sexually violent dance scenes.  Annabelle Lopez Ochoa and director, Nancy Meckler, cleverly stage these scenes in a way that hints at their nature without being overly explicit allowing the audience the freedom to engage with the harshness on their own level.  Whilst this isn’t comfortable viewing for many, the way in which it’s performed does allow for a certain amount of simplification if the audience member chooses – an incredibly fine balance which Scottish Ballet manages to strike.

In A Streetcar Named Desire, Scottish Ballet tackle issues of mental abuse and breakdown, alcoholism and rape, confused sexuality, affairs and suicide in a way that is challenging and engaging but also impressive and fun.  The vision of the creative team has been executed beautifully by the dancers and I’d highly recommend it.

A Streetcar Named Desire is now on tour around the UK, full details here.

All images by Andrew Ross