A Streetcar Named Desire

Broadway, December 1947: one set and four actors

Irene M. Selznick produced the play, and Elia Kazan directed it. Jo Mielziner designed the set and the lighting, and Lucinda Ballard made the costumes. The playbill set the action in New Orleans across one spring, summer and early autumn.

Brooks Atkinson reviewed the opening for The New York Times. He praised the single setting, which he said lightly sketched the house and the neighbourhood. He called Jessica Tandy's Blanche almost incredibly true. He also said the play was too long by Broadway standards, and then defended Tennessee Williams's right to write it that way.

Tandy won the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play in 1948. She and Kim Hunter left the cast at the end of May 1949. Uta Hagen took over Blanche, and Anthony Quinn, who had covered for Marlon Brando's holiday, later toured the play with her. Jack Palance stepped in as Stanley when Brando broke his nose.

The printed play reached readers within weeks. Reviewing the book in February 1948, C. V. Terry wrote in The New York Times that the text would repay close study by anyone who cared about the theatre. Terry described the story as simple as a figure in geometry. New Directions still publishes the play, now with an introduction by Arthur Miller and Williams's essay "The World I Live In".

Paris, October 1949: Jean Cocteau's version

Un tramway nommé Désir opened at the Théâtre Édouard VII in Paris on 15 October 1949. Paule de Beaumont made the translation, and Jean Cocteau turned it into the acting text. Raymond Rouleau directed, and Lila de Nobili designed the set.

Arletty played Blanche. Yves Vincent played Stanley, Héléna Bossis played Stella, and Daniel Ivernel played Mitch. The young Louis de Funès had the small part of Pablo, one of Stanley's friends.

Paris was not the first French-language staging. A Brussels company, Le Rideau, had played the play at Ixelles in Belgium in 1948. London was four days ahead of Paris. The London premiere was on 11 October 1949, with Vivien Leigh as Blanche.

Cocteau's text came out as a book the same year. The Paris publisher Bordas issued it in 1949, with a cover and lithographs by Cocteau himself. Later French book editions printed a different text. The collected Théâtre that Robert Laffont published in 1958 credits the adaptation of the play to Paule de Beaumont alone.

The production travelled. The Paris company reached the Théâtre des Célestins in Lyon in December 1950, with Madeleine Robinson as Blanche, and gave one performance at the Palais des Beaux-Arts, now Bozar, in Brussels in April 1951.

The film, and what the censors took out

Warner Bros. released Elia Kazan's film on 19 September 1951. Vivien Leigh played Blanche, and Marlon Brando, Kim Hunter and Karl Malden kept their Broadway parts. Bosley Crowther of The New York Times thought the film as fine as the play, if not finer.

Hollywood's censors objected to three things in the script. Blanche's young husband, Allan Grey, was plainly homosexual. Blanche herself had a sexual past. And Stanley rapes her. Letters in the censors' file show the studio and Kazan bargaining over all three for months.

The Catholic Legion of Decency then condemned the finished film. Warner Bros. cut it without asking Kazan, and the cuts earned it a milder rating. Warner Bros. put the missing footage back for a re-release in 1993.

The film won four Academy Awards. They went to Vivien Leigh for Best Actress, Kim Hunter and Karl Malden for the supporting parts, and the black-and-white art direction. Brando was nominated and did not win.

Neither a villain nor a hero

Tennessee Williams resisted the simple reading of the play, in which a brute destroys a delicate woman. He said he did not believe in villains or heroes, and that Blanche and Stanley were neither.

Brooks Atkinson made a similar point in 1947. To Stanley, he wrote, Blanche is an unforgivable liar. To Williams, she is one of the dispossessed, a woman whose past has left her unable to cope with real life.

Williams wrote the play in a year of private fear. He spent much of it convinced he was dying, and he later said he wrote Streetcar believing it would be his last play. Stanley's name and manner came from a loud co-worker at the St. Louis shoe factory where Williams had worked as a young man.