I have always been scared of Marlon Brando. From On the Waterfront and all the way to The Island of Dr. Moreau, I have found his screen presence genuinely unsettling. There was that Kubrick stare in his eyes, only more subtle and unnerving. There were gestures and intonations that resulted in physical dread bubbling under my skin. And I do not believe there has ever been a performance that unsettled me as much as Marlon Brando playing Stanley Kowalski in Elia Kazan's screen adaptation of A Streetcar Named Desire. It was a performance that left me traumatised for months. Remind me of it today, on a warm summer's day, and I will shiver.
But maybe it is all about the brilliance of Tennessee Williams's play, a play so viciously well-written, a play of such visceral power and intensity that all the pieces just fall into place, automatically, because there is nowhere else for them to fall? Sinister jazz writes itself and the haunted look on the face of Blanche DuBois is birthed by the written word? No, I believe not. A Streetcar Named Desire is a challenging masterpiece where both words are of equal importance.
Ochota Theater is a small venue in Old Ochota, perfect for an intimate performance after another sultry day in the heart of the city. The theatre was set up shortly before the war, and aside from a few brief periods of inactivity, it has been consistently involved in the art life of Warsaw. It is, like I say, a small theatre and an intimate space. They greet you and about 50 other people (the tickets have been sold out for weeks) at the entrance and ask to wait until 7 pm. Later, they lead you upstairs where you are warned against switching on your phone and taking seats with red ribbons on them. The anticipation is palpable, and there is a distinct sense of something different happening as we enter the relatively small rectangular room with chairs forming a broken semi-circle.
We take our seats (black and unnumbered), in silence and in apprehension, and I notice that the chair next to mine has that mysterious red ribbon running across it. The place is then taken by a young woman in plain clothes. Seconds later, a man appears to greet us and to ask certain people in the room to get up and to put on theatrical costumes. At which point the young woman to my left gets up, and together with four other people walks to the end of the room to get dressed. It will soon transpire that the young woman is Blanche DuBois. In the meantime, we watch the actors get dressed.
The fifth man, the host, will appear as an actor and a narrator many times throughout the night. Currently, he is telling us that we are in New Orleans, in a shabby working-class flat, and there is a cheap smell of bananas and cigarettes. Do we sense it? Oh yes, we do. Despite the fact that this is Warsaw, the language is Polish, the decorations are scant (a sofa, a fridge and a boxing arcade machine) and the only whiff of New Orleans is the sound of muffled jazz breaking through the invisible speakers. But the stage is set, even if the rumbling ghost of the streetcar is never really there.
The stage is set, and we are plunged full-on into the troubled world of Blanche DuBois coming back to her sister sharing the flat with her wild brute of a husband, Stanley Kowalski. The conditions are squalid and the prospects are dim. It is a hell-hole, basically, with no saving graces except for the existence of Stanley's friend and Blanche's awkward admirer Mitch. It is a tragic story of broken dreams, secrets and delusions. But mostly - about brutal past catching up on you with the graceless abandon of a serial rapist. However, I would argue that Tennessee Williams's play is really about the four complex characters whose guts are spattered out on the floor, gruesomely, right in front of you (incidentally, by the end of the night the stage was dirty with water, beer, whipped cream, whiskey and spit).
So how does this Polish night hold up, after millions of other adaptations - good and bad, loose and faithful, on stage and on TV? Incredibly well, I would say. The stage does not exist, and not simply because of that opening trick and sporadic conversations with the audience. No, the reason is much more simple than that: the stage does not exist quite literally. You are on the same level as the actors, and you get to feel the vibrations their feet create on the floorboards, the air they breathe out, the water they use to wash their hair (the shower, which is quite important in the play, stands in the corner of the 'stage'). It is a fascinating experience that goes beyond gimmicks and attempts at being 'clever' and 'different'. No, with A Streetcar Named Desire you can be neither clever (you will not outdo the actual play) nor different (not with the amount of adaptations the play has undergone).
I loved the way they employed the narrator, the fifth character, the man who is both 'us' and 'them'. He gives us the time and the day and he even has the audacity to tell us, at the very end, that there is a scene missing but that we should pretend the scene is actually there (and it is a vital scene, too, but they make it work in your imagination rather than in front of your eyes). The music is powerful (from The Drifters to David Bowie to Edith Piaf), as is the intriguing blend of modernity and the past. And then, of course, there are the performances: physical, emotional, dynamic. Stanley in particular is that dreaded mixture of insecurity and evil. You want to bring him beer, you try to avoid his stare. Is he in the same league with Marlon Brando? No one is, but this performance was all I ever wanted from an actor playing Stanley Kowalski. And then Blanche, too, won me over in the end - even if for a good half of the play I was missing the self-loving detachment of Vivien Leigh. However, it did come through, later, and I was moved to tears in one of the final scenes.
The connection to Poland is, of course, tenuous at best - but equally, it is hard to ignore the fact that Stanley Kowalski is of Polish descent (even if he does scream like a madman that he was born in the US and that he was not a 'fucking Polack'). To me, it made the idea of seeing the play in Warsaw absolutely essential as it somehow brought the story ever so closer to its burning core (even if just nominally). To me, it made it possible to tolerate the complete lack of a streetcar during this particular adaptation of the play (stage direction by Małgorzata Bogajewska). Because, and I cannot fail to see that as I step outside Ochota Theater into another sultry evening two hours later, the trams are all over the place. They are loud, and rattling, and the powerful vibrations penetrate every cell of my body.
