A journey through sociological & sexual 'rape'
AFTER her performance as Hamlet in the play of the
same name last year, I was wondering how Maxine Peak originally a lass from
Bolton would manage to tackle the lead role of Blanche DuBois in Tennessee
William's play 'A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE' now being performed at the
Manchester Royal Exchange Theatre. I
needn't have worried Maxine rose to the job and took us down into a wounded
world of which Arthur Miller described as 'STREETCAR is a cry of pain; forgetting that
is to forget the play'.
But how are we to approach such a play mired as
it is in the cramped space of a two room sparsely furnished apartment offering
us views of a combined living-room and bedroom with a bathroom on the
side? When Blanche from Mississippi arrives
to live with her sister Stella and her brother-in-law Stanley, in New Orleans
she was already what we would now call 'damaged' by having experienced a
marriage to a homosexual man who had just died.
Then begins the disintegration not only mentally of Blanche, but of the
relationships of those who come into contact with her, not just Stanley and
Stella, but Stanley's workmates, like Mitch.
Rachel Clements, lecturer in drama, theatre and
performance University of Manchester, in the program's brochure writes:
'There are reports that in (Elia) Kazan's 1947 production (on
Broadway), some audience members cheered as Stanley carried Blanche to the bed
to rape her. Although one hopes this
kind of response is now consigned to the past, both Mitch and Stanley's reactions
to and judgements about Blanche's sexuality are not so wholly remote.'
And Ms. Clements in keeping with our
contemporary 'Women's Studies' addiction continues:
'How far STREETCAR recreates or critiques rape culture
sits somewhere between the play, the particular production and each individual
audience member.'
That last comment by the academic would worry me
if she hadn't concluded:
'But STREETCAR is a social, even a political, play
because it works to show us how and why Blanche becomes disbelieved.'
While the play is about an individual's mental
condition, and how others relate to how Blanche breaches or disrupts the social
order of a tight-knit community, it is also about how the participants can
recover social order in the claustrophobic setting in which they all find
themselves.
Ms Clements further argues:
'Indeed, the tragedy of the play's closing scene is
desperately total: everyone loses.'
In a real sense by excluding Blanche, everyone
loses personally in order to recover social, and perhaps political, order and
even sanity. Because I believe Tennessee
Williams is what I would call a grown-up homosexual he is playing-off realism
against a more romantic magical approach in the theatre. Blanche wants she calls magic rather than
realism, but being romantic and dancing to music, doesn't prevent Blanche from
describing Stanley as a Neanderthal and a Polack*, not to mention dreaming the
day away in Stanley's bathroom, playing the radio or drinking his bourbon.
I'm not a professional drama critic, I'm an
electrician by trade, who later became an ethnomethodologist (student of
people's studies) at Manchester Poly. in the 1970s, but I can see the
predictable sociological destination of a claustrophobic society such as that
portrayed in 'A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE'.
This is not approve of the physical rape of
Blanche in any way, but rather to draw attention to her own sociological 'rape'
of the lives of the other characters in the play, especially of Stella and
Stanley's private life. One has only to be
aware of the underlying cultural, ethnic and clash social-class between Blanche
and Stanley in the play to grasp the politics of the play. Having lived in Spain (Mi casa, Su casa) in
part of the last half of the last century where the guest may be privileged
over the host; I am also aware that in some cultures Blanche's plight may be
seen in a different light than that in more Anglo-Saxon cultures such as
England or the USA, and it may well be that even in the deep-south 'in the heat
of the New Orleans apartment' the attitude to the 'guest' may be different from
ours.
* The noun Polack in the contemporary English language, is an ethnic slur and a derogatory reference to a person of Polish descent. It is an Anglicisation of the Polish language word Polak, which means a ... Look up Polack, Pollack, Pollock, or Polock in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.
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