Forget Paul Mescal as the sensitive lover who made Normal People essential watching during lockdown.
Here, cast as Stanley, the jealous, predatory husband in Tennessee Williams’s masterpiece, he’s the ugly, violent animating force of Rebecca Frecknall’s slowly broiling revival, pacing the stage like a tiger hungry for a fight.
Frecknall strips away a lot of the Southern gothic that can clog Williams’s portrait of psychological collapse.
She sets the action on a central bare stage, the brooding atmospherics determined almost entirely by drummer Tom Penn, whose rumblings resemble the beat of a sacrificial ritual hurtling towards its inevitable conclusion.
A large proportion of the audience are here for Mescal, but Patsy Ferran – cast after an injured Lydia Wilson was forced to withdraw – is equally extraordinary as Blanche duBois, the derelict and delusional Southern belle who washes up at her sister’s house on a tide of broken dreams.
Ferran reveals a rare steeliness to Blanche that proves more than a match for Stanley’s proprietary aggression. Anjana Vasan deserves mention, too, outstanding as the often-overlooked Stella.
Following his Oscar nomination, Mescal won’t have much space in his diary. But this production, as illuminating as that naked light bulb Blanche tries to cover up, deserves its spot in the West End.
A Streetcar Named Desire, Almeida Theatre, London
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