A Streetcar Named Desire, Scottish Ballet review — grace and menace in the Deep South

A steamy night in chilly Glasgow for the latest revival of A Streetcar Named Desire, strongly played and danced by Scottish Ballet and newly energised by Royal Ballet guest Ryoichi Hirano as the bestial but beguiling Stanley Kowalski.

The 2012 production was a bold commission by the company’s then-director Ashley Page, co-devised by theatre director Nancy Meckler and Belgian-Colombian choreographer Annabelle Lopez Ochoa. The scenario sticks fairly closely to Tennessee Williams’s 11 scenes but opts to reorder the material, robbing Blanche’s arrival of its mystery and giving us her whole tragic back story in an expository prologue.

Blanche DuBois, an innocent southern belle in white chiffon, is wooed and won by a nice young man, only to see him retreat to the other end of the ballroom with one of their (male) wedding guests before shooting himself. Sister Stella leaves for New Orleans, sundry relations drop dead (in canon) and Miss DuBois falls victim to the unkindness of strangers with a bottle of whiskey in a seedy hotel. You could argue that this chronological treatment makes better sense in a wordless narrative but if so why all the flashbacks? The bloodstained bridegroom regularly plays ghostly gooseberry in Blanche’s affairs and her sordid past is re-enacted by a doppelgänger entertaining gentleman callers in a cool follow spot.

Nicola Turner’s clever, adaptable designs begin with an ingenious puzzle-brick picture of the DuBois family mansion which collapses spectacularly, its beer crate blocks supplying props and furniture for the rest of the action. Tim Mitchell’s lighting is dominated by the naked lightbulbs that the ageing Blanche has learned to loathe and he sets each scene with skill, carefully zoning the space so that we can distinguish past from present. Peter Salem’s cinematic score is a smooth mix of pre-recorded sound — trains, church bells, malicious whispers — and his own jazzy writing. During flashbacks, 18 members of the Scottish Ballet Orchestra are supplemented by mangled snatches of “It’s Only a Paper Moon” and the folksy “Varsouviana” polka.

Thursday’s cast was led by a nervy, expressive Marge Hendrick as the brittle, deluded heroine. Lopez Ochoa’s pairwork takes care to embody Blanche’s many different relationships. There are faux-innocent twosomes for her dates with Jerome Barnes’s Mitch, a study in klutzy virtuosity. Key moments of her ugly past are chillingly conveyed in a pass-the-parcel pas de quatre, a dummy run for the final sickening showdown with her predatory brother-in-law.

Hirano excels as a ballet prince but is at his very best in more dramatically complex roles: Leontes, Rudolf, Onegin, Lescaut, even the creepy, Fritzl-ish Witch in Liam Scarlett’s best-forgotten 2013 Hansel and Gretel. In Streetcar he dominates the action with a pantherish blend of grace and menace. Bethany Kingsley-Garner is more than a match for her handsome Stanley and relishes the no-holds-barred duet which gives unnerving physical expression to Williams’s orgasmic “coloured lights” and reminds us, crucially, that her need is as great as his.

★★★★☆

Touring Scotland to June 30, scottishballet.co.uk