A Streetcar is a cry of pain.
Arthur Miller
After having been performed all over Europe, A Streetcar returns to the Odeon Theater for a few exceptional performances. The role of Kowalski will continue to be played by Andrzej Chyra, and that of Mitch by Yann Collette. And as was the case when it was first performed, the role of Blanche DuBois, adrift in a brutal world where her too sensitive heart and mind break down and collapse before our eyes, will be played by none other than Isabelle Huppert. From the very first few seconds of the play the rift in the heroine shatters her features, twists her body, cracks her voice. Her betrayed dreams, her loneliness, her despair are still secrets she hasn’t shared with anyone. Are we still at her sister’s, or are we now locked up with her in the cage inside her? She has nowhere to go, no place to flee from what she has become. And her final refuge, at the end of the line of this streetcar named Desire, is a tiny apartment where the proximity of other bodies, night after night for months on end, will finally end up in tragedy…The dead have more than one way to haunt the stage. When Blanche arrives at Stella’s place she already carries inside her an entire world which is dead and gone: the final echoes of the mythical South of plantations, an idealized family history, a disastrous married life which ends up in suicide. For Warlikowski she is the heart of the plot. Blanche is alone in exhibiting an internal self that the director wanted to accentuate by opening for us access to her mental landscape, peopled with echoes of her reading, or her reveries. As if Blanche, right from the very beginning, was already not quite in this world – this harsh, ugly world where she incessantly wounds herself by crashing up against the windows of a space which is far too narrow for her. There is only one step from Hells to hell – and this hell, which is “other people,” which the characters of Clorinde or Marguerite Gautier pass through, is first and foremost Blanche’s hell, the hell of a victim we are forbidden to believe and who bears within herself the most incurable pain, with no other shelter before her but the insane asylum, with no other exit than madness. We know that Warlikowski is particularly attentive to fables which reveal the transformations of the world and which make the signs of these transformations perceptible in the intimacy between people. And to then trace, from Eros to Thanatos, the tragic line of the gap which opens between these two universes, a gap which propagates itself in the lives of everybody and for which there is no cure. Warlikowski has not only commissioned Wajdi Nouawad to write a new version of Tramway. With his longtime co-directress, Malgorzata Szczesniak, he has conceived a most unusual setting, unexpected and suggestive, which lifts Williams’ masterpiece out of the realm of a mere mention in a footnote.
