The Wellesley Cinema joins 550 others around the country next week in showing the National Theatre’s ‘electrifying’ live performance of Tennessee Williams’s masterpiece ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’ direct from the stage of The Young Vic in London.
The production features Gillian Anderson in the role of Williams’s delicate, vulnerable, self-deluded Blanche DuBois who, now homeless and destitute, seeks refuge in her sister Stella’s apartment. In a performance described by critics as ‘shattering’, ‘unmissable’ and ‘an absolute knock-out’ and one which reduced one reviewer ‘almost to tears’, Anderson – who may be remembered from her screen roles in ‘The X Files’ and “The Fall’ – is joined by American film actor Ben Foster in his debut performance on the British stage as brutish, primal Stanley Kowalski, Stella’s husband. Vanessa Kirby plays the role of Stella, forced to choose between her sister’s compelling if manipulative needs and those of the muscular, earthy, virile Stanley.
Director Benedict Andrews has chosen to give the production a fresh interpretation, setting it in the present rather than the steamy Elysian Fields of 1940’s New Orleans, allowing the audience to see it in terms of present-day relationship dynamics, those which include domestic violence and thuggishness. The setting is fresh too – depicting the Kowalski’s apartment as recognisably modern with a constantly moving revolve conveying the sense of shifting perspectives.
The Telegraph’s theatre critic Charles Spencer said, “I staggered out of this shattering production of Tennessee Williams’s bruising modern classic feeling shaken, stirred and close to tears. Never have I seen a production of the play that was so raw in its emotion, so violent and so deeply upsetting.”
Not to be missed! The performance is on Tuesday 16th September at 7pm. Tickets can be booked online at www.wellesleycinema.co.uk or by phone on 0182 366-6668