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Biographies, when they matter, can act as a kind of corrective to the subject's boorishness. All that the star could not achieve in life-tenderness, care, responsibility toward others-doesn't get vanquished in great studies so much as explained and folded into the grand story of the complicated, arresting self. The British biographer Michael Holroyd's life of Lytton Strachey, for instance, is a major work about a minor Bloomsbury figure that is fascinating to read because Holroyd recognizes, without admonishing, Strachey's spectacular selfishness. It's Holroyd's witty view of it all that lifts the narrative up and propels the reader forward. John Lahr's distinctly American sense of humor-it never comes at his subject's expense-informs "Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh," his authoritative and felt new biography of the playwright (1911-1983). A great deal that made Williams appear out of order and out of touch during the latter part of his life and career-he called the nineteen-sixties his "stoned age"-grew out of forces that Lahr not only describes but explicates, illuminates, and makes resonate.

Lahr begins his life of the playwright with Williams's first hit-1945's "The Glass Menagerie." (Williams's first thirty-four years were chronicled in Lyle Leverich's excellent, if a trifle standard, 1995 biography, "Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams.") Shifting effortlessly between that historic play's record-making opening night, a critical assessment of its importance, and Williams's personal history-the playwright's backstage dramas with his lovers, agent, family, and so on, always equalled what was on stage; indeed, there was not much of a difference to Williams-Lahr's study is a masterpiece of the form because he has invented his own. Instead of merely chronicling Williams's rise as an author on the world stage and his death nearly forty years later, Lahr has made a critical and biographical mosaic. To his historian's love of chronology, he has applied a critical acumen (he was the lead theatre critic at this magazine for over two decades, and was twice the winner of the George Jean Nathan award for Dramatic Criticism) and a great reporter's acuity when it comes to unearthing the facts of Williams's background and his various psychological difficulties.

Born in Mississippi, Thomas Lanier Williams III-he would not change his name to Tennessee until 1938-was the first son of the Southern-born, Victorian-era raised Edwina and Cornelius Williams. Along with his older sister Rose and his younger brother Dakin, Williams was raised in an atmosphere defined by rupture and discord. Cornelius, who supported his family by working as a salesman, was a drinker and a womanizer. (His gay son would follow suit, but with boys.) Edwina was the only child of a probably gay pastor. Williams's rambunctious father loathed his wife's prim, smug attitude toward the world, her hatred of sex, not to mention what black elders might call her "sanctified" background. (According to Williams's unreliable but entertaining 1975 "Memoirs," Cornelius had a great deal of respect for his wife's mother, who was emotionally loving in a way that her daughter was not. It was her softness and compassion that drew her grandchildren to her as well. Williams always called her Grand, and wrote one of his finest short stories, "Oriflamme," about her-to him-anarchic spirit.) The repression, fear, and hysteria that shaped Edwina no doubt fed into Rose's madness. (During the Depression, Rose was diagnosed as schizophrenic; in 1943, she was lobotomized.) As a young patient, Rose often said that Cornelius had molested her. Williams's younger brother, Dakin, had no sexual experience until he was married, at the age of thirty-seven, while the homosexual Williams did not masturbate until he was in his mid-twenties.

Not one of the Williams children could ever effectively marry their bodies to the concept of freedom or joy. Constantly split between good and evil, guilt and pleasure, life and death, the Williams children heard one aria growing up: Edwina's torrent of words describing pain, betrayal, sin, and wrong doing. (Williams's first great female character, Amanda Wingfield, in "The Glass Menagerie," was pure Edwina.) Their mother was like an actress who can't leave the stage; her feelings were less real to her without an audience. Lahr argues that, like her imaginative son, a productive hysteric, Edwina wanted you to feel what she felt. But this is, of course, a physical and metaphysical impossibility: we are not each other but ourselves. Still, this particular tension drives much of Williams's best work, which often describes the difference between you and me even as his characters long not only to transmute their feelings but to make other bodies feel differently.

Like many authors, Williams wasn't adept at expressing himself outside of his work, but he sometimes evinced a startling degree of tough self-awareness. "The real fact is that no one means a great deal to me," he said in a 1945 interview. "I'm gregarious and like to be around people, but almost anybody will do." Lahr writes that Williams was at his "most alert, eloquent, humorous, vulnerable, and forthright when talking about the one pure thing in his life: his work." But what was pure? His writing was the bridge he tried to build between his besmirched, original-sin self-the self that loved the temporary pleasures of sex, but no doubt considered it "dirty"-and the self that sought purification in a world other than this one. Indeed, the world he represents in his 1943 short play, "The Purification," is a plea for that very thing-the expiation of guilt and sin. The pathos one finds in that piece, Williams's only verse play, grows out of the fact that the protagonist has murdered his sister-his one true love. Amidst the poetry, blood stops blood. (Siblings as the source of life and death and the imagination is also the theme of Williams's underrated 1973 play, "Outcry.") There was no end to Williams's guilt, remorse, and anger for having survived his sister, in particular, and his family as a whole. No survivor is ever free of his history of disaster.

From the first, Williams's work ethic was extraordinary. By the time he won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for "The Glass Menagerie," in 1945, he had written at least six full-length apprentice plays, innumerable one-acts, poems, and short stories. Writing was one way of being seen, and one way of hiding, too. For years, he was a furious blusher, particularly when in the company of someone for whom he felt more than a passing fancy. Still, he pushed past Edwina's crippling influences to become a self that she could and could not recognize as her progeny: an ambitious star. He could not not speak; his curtain was the page, and once he tore that curtain open Williams the artist lived to reveal the constant high-stakes drama that was himself. Sex was a corollary to the language; he stained sheets and stained pages and, as the years wore on, the awards piled up, and his various addictions-to booze, barbiturates, and Broadway success-piled up, too, he'd often leave all that mess for someone to clean up. Lahr documents how Elia Kazan, Williams's first great director, helped put certain pieces together, like the playwright's 1955 Pulitzer Prize-winning hit "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof," and the Williams-scripted 1956 movie "Baby Doll." (In later years, Williams's need to have someone wipe his ass grew more pronounced. Once, when he was meeting with the director John Hancock about a television script he'd written in the nineteen-seventies, he fell down drunk. Hancock did not pick him up. Some time later, Williams told the director that he was furious he hadn't picked him up. Neither had Cornelius or Edwina.)

Williams's hot view of a cold world found its most receptive audiences in the late nineteen-forties and nineteen-fifties, a period in American theatre that he dominated. The narrow, restrictive world that Truman and Eisenhower wrought was just a version of the kind of repression that Williams had grown up with; his work spoke to those who could not fit within the parameters of all those neat lawns and white picket fences and solid heterosexual values. In works ranging from 1947's "A Streetcar Named Desire" and 1951's "The Rose Tattoo" to 1958's "Suddenly Last Summer," Williams created a collective portrait of difference that often raised the ire of moralists ranging from the gatekeepers at Time to Cardinal Spellman, who denounced "Baby Doll" from the pulpit of St. Patrick's Cathedral. The world was correct, pious, duplicitous Edwina, and Williams wanted to queer the world. Stars ranging from Marlon Brando and Maureen Stapleton to Geraldine Page made their names in works by Williams, because they were brilliant, but also because they transmitted their difference, as Method artists, through the twisted light of Williams's characters, who are always set apart.

Lahr's reporter's eye-and his love of theatre-is not divisible from his skill at telling a good love story. Williams's primary adult relationship was with the charming and honest Frank Merlo, who, like an earlier love, eventually died of cancer. Williams and Merlo met in 1947 and were together for fourteen years. During that time, Merlo tried to find his voice as a writer, too, but unlike Williams Merlo put the drama of their relationship first. After Merlo's death in 1961, Williams began his long descent into commercial failure, that "dragon country" he feared most. (His last Broadway hit was 1961's "Night of the Iguana.") Despite the beauty of some of the poet's later work-Lahr is especially fine on the underrated "The Gnädiges Fräulein" (1966) and "In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel" (1969)-he kept measuring himself against his former self, that man who queered Broadway. But the value of his late experimental work was distinctly anti-Broadway: it was about the theatricalization of certain lonely truths, like the desire to speak and the work that goes into making a true sentence.

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Tennessee Williams's hot view of a cold world found its most receptive audiences in the restrictive world of the late nineteen-forties and nineteen-fifties.

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"A Streetcar Named Desire," by Tennessee Williams, is a fine and deeply disturbing play, almost faultless in the physical details of its production and the quality of its acting. It is hard to define it very satisfactorily for those who haven't seen it. Most of us at one time or another have come on some incident in the street, some scene of senseless brutality or intolerable humiliation, that struck us inescapably as the last act in a life. Usually, of course, we were mistaken, since the real climaxes are almost never identifiable, but still it gave the imagination, especially if literary, something to wrestle with, and often we got home with quite a story worked out in our heads. Mr. Williams' play might easily be the triumphant product of just such an experience. The last scene shows a woman being led away from a crumbling house in a nightmare street. She is not young, being in her middle thirties, but she is still handsome and she has a certain amount of style-Old South, as it happens, but still style-both in her manner and her dress. It would not be necessary to identify the two people with her as a doctor and an asylum attendant for anyone to see that she is quite mad. Obviously, any explanation for such a moment, for such a coincidence of smiling insanity-she is clearly delighted with her companions-and ruined elegance and unspeakable squalor, is faced with the danger of seeming either hopelessly inadequate or absurdly melodramatic. All I can say is that Mr. Williams has written a strong, wholly believable play that, starting in a low key, mounts slowly and inexorably to its shocking climax. I think it is an imperfect play, for reasons that I'll get around to in a minute, but it is certainly the most impressive one that has turned up this season, and I wouldn't be surprised if it was a sounder and more mature work than "The Glass Menagerie," the author's previous compliment to Southern womanhood.

Mr. Williams has placed "A Streetcar Named Desire" in the Vieux Carré in New Orleans, where it seems there is or was just such a car, as well as one labelled "Cemetery" and a neighborhood known as the Elysian Fields, life in this case being singularly obliging to art. The set represents the two-room apartment occupied by Stanley Kowalski, a young Pole somehow cryptically connected with the automobile business, and his pregnant bride, Stella, a fine, highly sexed girl, though the daughter of that most exhausted of all aristocracies, an old Southern family. It is possible that some scenic artist somewhere has contrived a more gruesome interior than the decaying horror that Jo Mielziner has executed for the Kowalskis, but I doubt it. It is on the ground floor (outside, a circular iron staircase winds up to another apartment, containing perhaps the least inhibited married couple ever offered on the stage); there is no door between the two rooms, only a curtain; the furnishings are sparse and dreadful; the desolate street outside can be seen through the windows, or, rather, through the walls, since Mr. Mielziner's design is by no means literal. It is a wonderful effect and, as the evening wears along, oppressive almost beyond words.

One spring morning, Stella's older sister, Blanche, turns up at this hovel. She is a strange girl, but at first there is nothing visibly wrong with her except a slight hysteria, which she tries to fight down with frequent surreptitious drinks of whiskey, and that grotesque and terrible refinement that Mr. Williams has carried over from his portrait of the mother in "The Glass Menagerie." She is fashionably appalled by the Kowalski apartment and the goings on in it, which include an incredibly seedy, brawling poker game, but this is nothing compared with the dismay she experiences at her first sight of her sister's husband. This is understandable, since, thanks to a peculiar combination of script and casting, this character emerges as almost wholly subhuman-illiterate, dirty, violent, and even somehow with a suggestion of physical deformity, an apelike quality, about him. In addition to the personal disgust he inspires in her, Blanche is slowly forced to realize that her desperate pretending is no good with him; from the moment she comes in, he suspects the unbearable truth about her, and when she seems to be infecting her sister with her stylish ways, he drags it out into the light, with contemptuous brutality.

It is something of a tribute to Mr. Williams' talent that the story of Blanche's past can seem even momentarily credible. The two girls were brought up in an old house, apparently the conventional "decaying mansion," which he has chosen to call Belle Rêve, though they pronounce It "Belle Reeve." Like Stella, Blanche married, but it was a brief and tragic escape, since the boy was a homosexual who shot himself after his seventeen-year-old bride had discovered him in a situation that could hardly be misinterpreted. She went back to Belle Rêve, where she watched the awful, lingering deaths of three old women, and then, when the creditors had taken the house, went on to a town called Laurel, where she taught school and gradually, in a sick-or quite possibly, by this time, an insane-revulsion against death, took up with many men. The Laurel episode ended with her seduction of an adolescent boy (youth plus love, I gather, seemed to her the absolute antithesis of death, though, of course, some authorities might have diagnosed simple nymphomania) and with her expulsion from the town, where, in her brother-in-law's sardonic phrase, she was getting to be somewhat better known than the President of the United States.

By the time Blanche comes to her sister's apartment, she has manufactured a gaudy and pathetic substitute past for herself, full of rich and handsome suitors, who respectfully admire her mind, but Kowalski tears that down ruthlessly, without any special moral indignation but with a savage, obscene humor that is infinitely more torturing. He also gives her secret away to the one man-a poor specimen, but kind and honest-who might conceivably have saved her and then takes her, casually and contemptuously, himself. The end comes when she tries to tell this to her sister, who, unable to believe it and still go on with her marriage, consents to having her committed to an asylum. This is, I'm afraid, a pretty poor synopsis-there is no way, for instance, to convey the effect Mr. Williams achieves in his last act of a mind desperately retreating into the beautiful, crazy world it has built for itself-but perhaps it is enough to give you the general idea.

The reservations I have may easily be captious. Principally, it seems to me that in the emotional surge of writing his play Mr. Williams has been guilty of establishing a too facile and romantic connection between Belle Rêve and the Vieux Carré. Not knowing much about the South, old or new, it was hard for me to visualize the girls' ancestral home, except as something vaguely resembling the House of Usher, but Stella is written and played as a pretty, reasonably cultivated girl, in no sense unbalanced, and her abrupt and cheerful descent into the lower depths of New Orleans seems rather incredible. Mr. Williams attempts, though the evidence on the stage is against him, to portray Kowalski as a man of enormous sexual attraction, so that the very sight of him causes her to see colored pinwheels, but even that is scarcely enough. It is the same, to some extent, with Blanche; whatever the forces working against her may have been, her degradation is much too rapid and complete, her fall from whatever position she may have occupied in a top level of society to the bottom of the last level a good deal more picturesque than probable. As I say, it is conceivable that these transitions do occur in the South, but it is my suspicion that Mr. Williams has adjusted life fairly drastically to fit his special theme. The only other thing I might complain about (Blanche's arrival from Laurel, where apparently she had just been tossed out of a cheap hotel, with a trunkful of pretty expensive-looking jewelry and clothes perplexed me some, but I'm willing to let it go) is the somewhat sustained and literary analogy that keeps turning up between the streetcars named for passion and death and the tragic conflict in the heroine's mind. Mr. Williams seems to me much too good a playwright now to bother his head with these ladies'-club mystifications. "A Streetcar Named Desire" is a brilliant, implacable play about the disintegration of a woman, or, if you like, of a society; it has no possible need for the kind of pseudo-poetic decoration that more vacant authors so often employ to disguise their fundamental lack of thought.

After all that, I'm sorry to say there isn't much room left for the compliments to the cast, though God knows they and, of course, Elia Kazan, their director, deserve all I can offer them. Briefly, Jessica Tandy gives a superb, steadily rising performance as Blanche; Marlon Brando, as Kowalski, is, as hinted previously, almost pure ape (his sister-in-law's description of him as "common" entertained me quite a lot, there in the dark), and though he undoubtedly emphasizes the horrors of the Vieux Carré as opposed to Belle Rêve, it is a brutally effective characterization; Karl Malden, as Blanche's unhappy suitor, gets a queer, touching blend of dignity and pathos into what you might call one of those difficult, listening parts; and Kim Hunter, as Stella, is sympathetic and restrained and very decorative indeed. The others, representing the inhabitants of that abandoned district, all seemed admirable and awful to me. ♦

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Wolcott Gibbs reviews Tennessee Williams' play "A Streetcar Named Desire."

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As far as I'm concerned, even the ushers and ticket-takers at the Ethel Barrymore Theater are beautiful these nights, and the cop on the corner of Forty-seventh Street and Eighth Avenue, and his horse. Such is the effect of a magnificent play, magnificently done. The play is A Streetcar Named Desire, by Tennessee Williams, and the production is the result of Elia Kazan's direction, Jo Mielziner's scenery and lighting and, I suppose, Irene Selznick's money, all of which have my unqualified blessing.

The play is better than Williams's other success, The Glass Menagerie, because, while it has all of the tenderness, poetry, observation and wit of the earlier piece, it adds the element of true tragedy to its other merits.

Fable. It is a despairing and lovely play, in which the author, in oblique parable form, says that beauty is shipwrecked on the rock of the world's vulgarity; that the most sensitive seekers after beauty are earliest and most bitterly broken and perverted. It is an answer, however unintended, to Harvey and The Iceman Cometh, which said that illusion provides the necessary armor behind which life can survive. A Streetcar Named Desire (and what a haunting, musically dissonant title it is) tells us that illusion is an armor, but one which is always pierced, and in the most mortal spots.

Beauty is shipwrecked on the rock of the world's vulgarity.

But the parable is hidden artfully in the body of the play. While you are exposed to the magic on the Barrymore stage, you see only the suffering, doomed struggles of a lying, posing, half-demented, pathetic, fully drawn woman, whose dreams are all lace and magnolia, and whose life, given cheaply to whisky and men, has been unbelievably raw and sordid. You may think, as I do, that Williams's generalization is too easily defeatist, that he himself has dipped into the most squalid depths and come up with a steadily beautiful work of art; but, particularly, there is an awesome credibility about the character of his main creation, Blanche du Bois. She is as real to us as if she were a living woman put to the torture and done to death in our own front parlor.

Language of life. The play is written with a triumphantly heightened naturalism, in which the rhythms and images of ordinary life are subtly combined and contrasted with a verselike elegance of phrase. It falls on the ear like fresh rain after the businesslike tracts of manufactured dialogue which have too long done duty for human speech on the American stage. It finally has the surprising effect of seeming infinitely more real, more like life itself, than all the clipped banalities lesser playwrights put together in the dreary name of realism.

The production matches the script point for point. Absolutely arbitrary, with a back wall through which we can see the street beyond, with a steel staircase spiraling off to one side, going God-knows-where, with lights softly growing in intensity and capriciously fading off into darkness, with a spotlight lovingly following the heroine throughout the evening, with voices and music breaking in again and again with no reasonable justification but thunderous effect, the director and scene designer have boldly realized that a world on the stage has the limits, the beauty and the belief that the artist wishes them to have.

In his direction Kazan has caught the combination of Southern, rambling languor, slashed by moments of blazing violence, that the play calls for. In the same way, Jo Mielziner has designed a setting that is at once sordid, ugly, dreamlike, and glorious.

Acting power. Jessica Tandy, in the heroic role of Blanche, suffers only from the fact that some seasons back we all saw Laurette Taylor in another Williams play. Everything that talent, intelligence, discipline can do, Miss Tandy does. We pity her, we are amused by her, we suffer with her, and are enchanted with the clarity and grace with which she speaks her lines-and at the end, broken and bereft of reason, she leaves us desolate. But the solitary and touching genius that was Miss Taylor's is not here. It is unjust to judge an actress by such a fanatic standard, but it is impossible not to remember.

With his brooding, savage portrayal of the violent Stanley Kowalski, Marlon Brando arrives as the best young actor on the American stage. Most young men in our theater seem hardly violent enough to complain to a waiter who has brought them cream instead of lemon. Brando seems always on the verge of tearing down the proscenium with his bare hands.

Marlon Brando arrives as the best young actor on the American stage.

Representing the healthy, driving forces of the flesh, Brando plays a useful trick on us. He is so amusing in a direct , almost childlike way in the beginning, and we have been so conditioned by the modern doctrine that what is natural is good, that we admire him and sympathize with him. Then, bit by bit, with a full account of what his good points really are, we come dimly to see that he is one of the villains of the piece, brutish, destructive in his healthy egotism, dangerous, immoral, surviving. By a slouching and apelike posture, by a curious, submerged and almost inarticulate manner of speech, by an explosive quickness of movement, Brando documents completely a terrifying characterization.

Forgotten role. In almost every play, no matter how excellent, the author usually neglects one character. In this play it is Stella Kowalski, Blanche's sister. The idea for the character is interesting-the upper-class girl who for the overbearing pleasures of the flesh has willfully and delightedly allowed herself to become the slattern her husband can desire and understand. But in its development the character is skimped; neither the slattern nor the belle is convincing. Miss Kim Hunter, playing this troubled role, is baffled by her problem and leaves it where she found it. On almost any other stage in New York she would probably appear as a superior actress. But in this gifted company, new standards must be applied.

I must put in a word about one of my favorite actors, Karl Maiden, who seems, in a wide variety of parts through the recent years, never to have been able to do any wrong. Here, as a shy, anguished, groping, and disappointed suitor, he supplies a rueful humor and an elephantine delicacy that are immensely helpful.

I regret that space does not permit examination of another important event-the Experimental Theatre's brave production of Bertolt Brecht's Galileo. Next week, when I have recovered somewhat from A Streetcar Named Desire.

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The Brutal Beauty of "A Streetcar Named Desire"

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As far as I'm concerned, even the ushers and ticket-takers at the Ethel Barrymore Theater are beautiful these nights, and the cop on the corner of Forty-seventh Street and Eighth Avenue, and his horse. Such is the effect of a magnificent play, magnificently done.

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ennessee Williams's old bus keeps on running. The Almeida's production of A Streetcar Named Desire, starring Patsy Ferran and directed by Rebecca Frecknall, is the play's fifth major UK revival in the last 20 years. That's not bad going for a work that at its 1947 New York premiere was described as the product of "an almost desperately morbid turn of mind" and two years later in London was dismissed by one critic as "a messy little anecdote".

So why has the play lasted so well? There are multiple reasons but the most fundamental is its air of tantalising ambiguity. When Blanche DuBois floats into New Orleans's ironically named Elysian Fields and finds herself up against her Polish-American brother-in-law, Stanley Kowalski, it seems as if we are facing a primal conflict: Blanche, quoting Hawthorne, Whitman and Poe, seems to represent the poetic spirit while Stanley's mentality, in the words of that fine critic Harold Clurman, "provides the soil for fascism viewed not as political movement but as a state of being". That is Blanche's own view of the situation when she urges her sister, Stella, "In this dark march towards whatever it is we're approaching ... Don't - don't hang back with the brutes."

Glenn Close (Blanche DuBois) and Iain Glen (Stanley Kowalski) in A Streetcar Named Desire at the National Theatre in 2002. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

But Blanche and Stanley are both more complex than that simple opposition suggests. Blanche, while being lonely, vulnerable and haunted by the suicide of her gay, young husband, is also vain, self-deceiving and filled with an aristocratic disdain for her brother-in-law whom she variously compares to an ape and swine. Stanley, although coarse, materialistic and ultimately rapacious, also feels, with some justice, that his wife, Stella, has been cheated of her inheritance. He has a firm grasp of reality and sacrifices the devotion of both his wife and his best friend, Mitch, in his desire to overcome Blanche. Like all great plays, Streetcar throws instant moral judgments into question.

That links to another reason for the play's survival: it offers scope for actors to provide their own interpretation and over the years I've seen a rich variety of Blanches. Glenn Close at the National in 2002 oozed fluttery condescension and coy gentility while bringing out Blanche's pain. Rachel Weisz at the Donmar in 2009 rapturously hymned "beauty of the mind and richness of the spirit and tenderness of the heart".

Ruth Wilson (Stella) and Rachel Weisz (Blanche) in A Streetcar Named Desire at the Donmar Warehouse in 2009. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

Gillian Anderson, playing on a rotating stage at the Young Vic in 2014, was a deeply sensuous, tactile Blanche who stroked Stanley's hairy forearms and provocatively disrobed in front of a flimsy curtain. Maxine Peake, at Manchester's Royal Exchange in 2016, was so steeped in self-delusion that when she urged Stella "to pull yourself together and face facts" she was blissfully unaware of the line's boomerang irony. That brisk summary also does no justice to the equally varied Stanleys of Iain Glen, Elliot Cowan, Ben Foster and Ben Batt.

Another test of a great play is that, while inescapably a product of its time, it also invokes the past and anticipates the future. It is not hard to see that Tennessee Williams was a devotee of Chekhov in that Streetcar is a poetic drama in the fullest sense of the word: it is not so much the language as the use of sound and music, especially the polka that Blanche hears in her head when recalling her fatal marriage, that heightens emotion.

And when a character says in the last scene that "Life has got to go on. No matter what happens, you've got to keep going" she echoes the need for endurance that is a persistent motif in Chekhov. But Streetcar is also a battle for territory in a domestic jungle in which Stanley is the reigning lion-king and Blanche the spatial invader: at times, it is almost a literal battle in which the pair vie for occupancy of the apartment's single bathroom. If that idea of life as a constant struggle for territory brings anyone to mind, it is Harold Pinter.

There is no single reason why Williams's play survives. But in the end it comes down to the fact that there is something in it that defies explanation and that allows it to be given colour and shape by its individual interpreters. If that is true of Hamlet and Hedda Gabler, it is equally true of Williams's long-running Streetcar.

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A desire for Streetcar: the enduring allure of Tennessee Williams's tantalising classic

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ennessee Williams's old bus keeps on running. The Almeida's production of A Streetcar Named Desire, starring Patsy Ferran and directed by Rebecca Frecknall, is the play's fifth major UK revival in the last 20 years.