As the Young Vic’s 2014 production is streamed for National Theatre at Home, its star reveals how deeply she inhabited her character
A Streetcar Named Desire is often seen as a play about sexuality but the Young Vic production draws our eye to the sibling bond between Blanche DuBois and her sister, Stella. Was there a focus on the sisters?
I felt like I knew the play inside out until I started working on this production, which peels away the onion layers on all the relationships between its characters. Firstly, there’s something absolutely extraordinary about the complexity of Williams’s drama which has so many layers. Benedict Andrews, who was the most fantastic director for this, got it on a deep, cellular level and created a platform where you could just keep ploughing through and investing in the joy and complexity of it.
Out of that came a whole new level between the sisters – not only the competition and jealousy between them but the guilt, love, shame and a gamut of other emotions. Sex came into both their lives at an early age – what was expected of them, what they were used for and the discovery that their sexuality was their currency. Blanche uses it to the nth degree but it is also Stella’s currency.
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