""A Streetcar Named Desire", Tennessee William's play, has opened at the National Theatre, with movie actress Glenn Close playing the classic role of Blanche DuBois.

(Edited highlights of the panel's review)

Watch the whole programme - 11 October 2002

MARK LAWSON:
A Streetcar Named Desire, tickets are cheap. Were you glad you had one?

ROSIE BOYCOTT:
I was incredibly glad I had one. It was one of the best nights in the theatre I've had for a very long time. It is a wonderful play.

I thought it was wonderfully produced and acted. Glenn Close completely got Blanche. This tragic, wonderful character.

From the moment she totters on to the stage in an immaculate little white suit, expecting something quite different.

She finds herself in her sister's two-room flat. The set is wonderful, showing you the heat of New Orleans around one side and a small, rather shabby place.

Iain Glen's Stanley Kowalski is wonderful. I thought he was very sinister and very cruel.

When he starts to try to unravel the secrets behind Blanche's life, the cruelty becomes intense, culminating in a wonderful moment on her birthday when he hands her a card which is a return ticket on a Greyhound bus from where she has run away from.

MARK LAWSON:
Iain Glen could be professor of Polish studies at Louisiana University I thought. It is very different. Did it work for you?

GERMAINE GREER:
It made me rethink lots of things.

I thought it was a play starring a spiral stair case which made it so difficult for the actors to use. It made nonsense of their business about four times.

Also, they treated the text as if it was wholly writ. They didn't shorten it at all.

They will cut Shakespeare by a third but we had the full length of the play with its reworking of the themes until they were so obvious you wanted to scream, like the gun shot and the waltz that you had to listen to.

The real problem was Glenn Close. She is too clean, with that great square jaw. She's not fragile at all. She's made of white hot steel. Blanche should have a dirty side to her. There was none of that in her character.

Kowalski is used to being played as pure testosterone, he is not pure cruelty either. He is living in a two- bedroom place and you understand why he has to get Blanche DuBois out of there.

ROSIE BOYCOTT:
It is part of the play. You understand Blanche is an incredibly irritating character. I thought she played it wonderfully.

GERMAINE GREER:
I don't think the point about Kowalski is that he is cruel.

One of the things about the play is that it has a really gay notion about what heterosexual sex is like, which is kind of wrong.

And then Blanche's tragedy is the homosexuality of her husband which leads him to kill himself and then she goes into another fancy relationship.

It was all there, but it just made me rethink the play. I thought of it as a classic and I'm now convinced it isn't one.

MARK LAWSON:
No longer a classic. Nitin Sawhney?

NITIN SAWHNEY:
I agree about Glenn Close, to be honest. I didn't feel emotionally engaged during the course of the whole play.

I think she's an incredible actress. I thought she was good in The World According To Garp, she has that kind of ability. I thought this was out of her range.

I felt with Iain Glen as Stanley, at one point it was almost like he was throwing a tantrum as opposed to being angry. I felt that none of the actors could command a certain stillness.

MARK LAWSON:
Blanch is supposed to be in her 30s. Glenn Close is in her 50's. It is a stretch?

ROSIE BOYCOTT:
Yes. I thought to begin with it throws you. In fact, I think she kind of pulled it off completely because of the way she dresses, acts.

I'm amazed at you Germaine in saying that you didn't see a cruelty in Kowalski. I found him extremely cruel and believable as a good-looking guy who is desperately frustrated.

When he beats up on his wife, you see the way he hits her and comes back straight away and tries to make good over that. But that was a very, very genuine feeling.

I thought he was a terrific character. He has to be played as much more rough trade. Marlon Brando was not that much rough trade in the original.

GERMAINE GREER:
He played it as inarticulate. Glenn plays it as articulate strangely. You don't get the intensity and frustration that he has with her.

MARK LAWSON:
What Nunn is trying to do is make it a play about racism. It is supposed to be entirely unjustified.

NITIN SAWHNEY:
I mean, he's described in the play as an ape-like figure or as an animal. That quality doesn't come across.

ROSIE BOYCOTT:
That is Blanche's delusion about him.

NITIN SAWHNEY:
The emphasis is on him being brutish and animal-like and he doesn't command that.

ROSIE BOYCOTT:
He is incredibly cruel, he's saying, "I'm the man in the house, all the women will do what I want all the time." He can hit Stella when he wants.

MARK LAWSON:
I thought he was a figure desperately clinging on. The point Germaine raised is interesting.

Recent modern plays are getting longer and longer. This has taken very slowly. It's three hours. It is an odd decision to lengthening and stretch?

ROSIE BOYCOTT:
It is a great text, and I didn't mind the gaps in between, when he gave you the jazz music in between.

GERMAINE GREER:
I don't think it is a great text. I don't think it really deserved that treatment. I think it turned out to be rather thin.