Theatre review: A Streetcar Named Desire

Rapture Theatre scored a resounding hit earlier this year, with a production of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? that featured a world-class performance from Sara Stewart as one of the greatest American anti-heroines, the wrecked and brilliant Martha. Four months on, though, Tennessee Williams’s mighty 1947 masterpiece A Streetcar Named Desire - likewise built around an unforgettable American female character, Blanche Dubois – seems somehow to escape Rapture’s grasp; although Gina Isaac’s central performance as Blanche is poignant, thoughtful, and sometimes frightening in its powerful sense of Blanche as an eternal sexual outsider, savagely punished by society for failing to conform to either of the stereotypes available for women, the mother/madonna, or the whore.