When ageing, vulnerable, demimonde Blanche Dubois, ‘a delicate beauty who must avoid strong light’ arrives unannounced in the city of New Orleans, she rides ‘A streetcar named Desire’ to visit her sister, Stella. Stella is married and living in an insalubrious part of town with her husband, Stanley Kowalski, a man who takes women with the pride and power of a richly feathered male bird; thus Tennessee Williams’ sets the stage for a nasty collision of worlds and words.

‘A streetcar named Desire’ shimmers with violence and desire twisted, frustrated, broken and repressed. Williams’ is an immensely ‘readable’ playwright; the brutishness of Stan Kowalski, and the ‘moth like’ beauty of Blanche Dubois, immortalised by Marlon Brando and Vivien Leigh in the 1950s film adaptation of the play leap vividly off the page; so too does the message that life is an orgy of violence and beauty, language is merely a tool for dissembling and love is the ultimate betrayal.

The tragic characters in Streetcar seem only able to express truth when assaulting one another. On one level a simple play about frustrated desire, Streetcar is a powerful vision of artistic sensuality crushed by a banality implacably against fantasy.

This collection also contains The Glass Menagerie, William’s first successful play, and an essay by the playwright on the prevalence of violence in his work.

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