With a pink bow in her hair, a mauve muslin dress, a handbag, Blanche DuBois (Cristiana Reali) arrives at her
“little sister”
, Stella (a very convincing Alysson Paradis), who lives in a neighborhood in New Orleans.
Dressed, fragile, she worries about meeting her husband, Stanley Kowalski (Nicolas Avinée, aggressive mustache).
Blanche waits for her sister, is surprised that she lives in these
“terrible conditions”
.
A poorly lit two-room kitchen, separated by transparent veils (design by James Brandily).
Blanche will sleep on her bed.
“Will you be okay?”
»
Stella asks him.
How long does she stay?
Blanche doesn't know it, she has lost Belle Rêve, the family property.
She cries a lot, Drinks, but wants to give the lie.
Blanche is the Marilyn of the Unhinged.
Maladapted, broken, neurotic, schizophrenic (director Pauline Susini insists).
Moist eyes, trembling lips, Cristiana Reali is like disguised as an unbalanced little girl.
Monitored by Stanley Kowalski, a worker of Polish origin, boorish and alcoholic, who cannot stand her presence and whose main leisure activity is playing poker with his friends.
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Blanche lives in fear that he will discover her situation.
She is no longer a professor of English literature, she is ruined.
Aging, she deceives herself, dressing herself in extravagant outfits, vestiges of her former splendor.
She softens Mitch (Lionel Abelanski), Stanley's best friend, another lonely person, who lives with his mother.
Candid and wheeled
In isolation, Pauline Susini's adaptation focuses on the violence of the relationships between the characters which runs throughout A Streetcar Named Desire, by Tennessee Williams, in the translation by Isabelle Famchon.
Pauline Susini wanted to make the plot resonate in today's society.
Arguments, beatings and sexual assaults create permanent tension.
Supported by a solid troupe, Joël Pommerat's former assistant follows in the footsteps of Elia Kazan's film, with Vivien Leigh and Marlon Brando (1951).
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A little long, the play does not leave the footsteps of Blanche, who loses her sense of reality.
“Fairy!”
This is what I seek to give to others!
I want to embellish things.
I'm not telling the truth, I'm telling what the truth should be!
»
, she proclaims.
Just hallucinating, Cristiana Reali, who is not her first Tennessee Williams, has the postures of Joan Crawford, she carries the piece on her shoulders, invested body and soul in the incarnation of this pathetic heroine.
A fallen aristocrat, candid and cunning, anguished by the passage of time and ready to do anything to be loved.
In this tram called danger, the actress certainly arouses compassion.
A tram named desire
, at the Théâtre des Bouffes Parisiens (Paris 2nd), until March 31.
Loc.
: 01 86 47 72 43.