Facing the unfaceable

Simon Blow explores the link between Tennessee Williams and Streetcar's Blanche DuBois

Is the fantasy condition of Blanche DuBois - the tragic heroine of A Streetcar Named Desire - a situation that is, in fact, near to all of us? Is her refusal to match fantasy with reality one of the strong reasons for the play's continuing appeal?

It is 23 years since Tennessee Williams's harrowing drama was last performed in London's West End. Then it ran to a packed house for well over a year. But a generation has since grown up who will know it only through the Vivien Leigh/ Marlon Brando film version. Now it is on the London stage once more, for a limited season, but this year marking the 50th anniversary of Blanche DuBois's announcement that she has always depended on the kindness of strangers. The line has passed into folklore, but its import never lessens. It is the final cruel moment of a play that allows its heroine no breathing space. Her illusions successively shattered, it is the ghastly irony of that line which echoes on long after the curtain has fallen. For Blanche has taken the doctor's arm to be led not towards love but to an institution for the insane.

Was Blanche, I wonder, a difficult character for Tennessee Williams to create? Do her fantasies and delusions happen to women more than men, or are they the lies we all fill ourselves with once our spirit has broken? Take away her display of femininity and what we see is her appalling loneliness. Loneliness has no gender, except the plea to be cared for is heard more often from a woman than from a man. And this because the heterosexual man would never permit himself Blanche's extravagances. A heterosexual man would not wish to recognise the feminine in himself. Which is why it took a homosexual to convey her unbalanced, neurasthenic condition with such accuracy.

As a homosexual, Tennessee Williams knew about life on the edge. His own attachments were often marred by an insecurity which he once described like this: `All my life have been haunted by the obsession that to desire a thing or to love a thing intensely is to place yourself in a vulnerable position, to be a possible, if not a probable, loser of what you most want.' This is why Blanche seizes every sexual opportunity offered to her - her fragile self-esteem will not permit her to lose.

When a boy, Tennessee Williams was mocked by his father for being 'a sissy', but more because he read than because he had effeminate gestures. Then, as a young man, he fell in love with a dancer who resembled Nijinsky. The dancer, fearful of remaining homosexual, left him and, aged 24, died. Otherwise, Tennessee Williams had one stable relationship, which for 15 years gave him an anchor. But homosexuals are not secure, and, like Blanche - as a wounded adult - he cruised the water-front. Also he had grown up at a time and in a society where homosexuality was deemed evil. The result was that Tennessee Williams wanted to escape from deforming taboos. But he remained sensitive to the fact that, like Blanche, what he was doing was judged sinful. He could never quite sort it out and rid himself of guilt. Like Blanche, he was confused. He once wrote a poem in the 1950s about the fate of misfits and queers. Here is one verse:

I think in places known as gay, In secret clubs and private bars, The damned will serenade the damned With frantic drums and wild guitars.

And so he became the poet of the misfit and the outsider. He adored his sister Rose whom life also had wounded when their mother ordered a lobotomy to be performed on her after she had a mild breakdown and started talking dirty. Like Tennessee, Rose became an outsider and spent the rest of her life in a sanatorium. He wrote her into The Glass Menagerie as the physically deformed Laura to whom brother Tom cries, `Blow out your candles.' He tells her, too - in a memorable phrase that `the world is lit by lightning'. There can be no fulfilment for the deformed in a world of bias and harsh misunderstanding.

Snatched moments, heralding promise, is the best we can hope for, says Williams. When Mitch suddenly kisses Blanche in Streetcar, she gasps, `Sometimes - there's God - so quickly!' Williams knew that in a homosexual experience there is never any time. All too frequently homosexual encounters are fast made, and fast forgot. He gave Blanche a sex-lust that is utterly familiar to homosexuals. It was, though, hardly recognised as a female characteristic in the 1940s, and I suspect is still refuted by the prim. But sex-lust simmers away beneath the surface for everybody. Do I hear denials? It was precisely because Tennessee Williams was a homosexual - not closeted - and, therefore, an outsider, that he could be honest. He had no pretences to keep up. With Streetcar he broke taboos for heterosexuals that many had and have - never escaped from, except furtively, throughout a whole lifetime.

This is why A Streetcar Named Desire is always so popular. It continues to tackle emotional and sexual taboos that will not easily go away. Peter Hall's new production at the Haymarket has already sold over half a million pounds worth of advance bookings. Jessica Lange may lack Vivien Leigh's smouldering sexuality but Blanche's dreams of what her life should be - set against the pathos of the truth - are as powerful as ever. They are fantasies that we all have to lesser or greater degrees but dare not speak about.