Corrections to the blogosphere, the consensus, and the world

Monday, January 19, 2015

A streetcar named disappointment

Saw the National Theatre film of Streetcar, with Gillian Anderson.
To begin with something not at all her fault, she's too big for the role of Blanche. When she's fighting with Stanley, I'd give her odds.
And too old - or at least her sister was too young; you couldn't really bring them together under the same roof as children, chronologically.
Other difficulties were to do with the updating to the present day.  They didn't have a feel for the shifts in class labelling.  The most striking example was that during the poker games Stanley and his mates were drinking light beer.  And at the end the sixpack that Stanley brought in was imported beer - Heineken. Implausible today; impossible to imagine then. It changes the ambience destructively.
Again, Blanche and her sister had too few common class markings; hard to believe that someone brought up in Blanche's family would wear cutoff shorts, even when a class traitor marrying beneath herself.
 And if you update the time, you bring the homosexuality subplot into difficulties; people today would react differently to the crucial revelation.

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