Endstation: Violence — on the premiere of Neumeier's "A Streetcar Named Desire" in Düsseldorf

On May 8, the Deutsche Oper am Rhein in Düsseldorf premiered John Neumeier's A Streetcar Named Desire — a ballet by one of the most legendary choreographers of our time.

It was with this very production that the Hamburg Ballet opened its 50th and final season under Neumeier in 2023. And though A Streetcar Named Desire enjoys less popularity with companies than, say, The Lady of the Camellias — currently running in Munich and Paris this season alone — it is precisely this ballet that retains its urgency and speaks to audiences on the social issues that matter today. All the more remarkable, then, that Ballett am Rhein has secured this important and landmark work for its repertoire.

A Streetcar Named Desire is, of course, the immortal play by Tennessee Williams that won him the Pulitzer Prize, and whose screen adaptation, starring Vivien Leigh and Marlon Brando, won four Academy Awards. Almost 80 years after its premiere, directors, performers, audiences, and readers around the world continue to interpret the plot and its characters in radically different ways.

What is A Streetcar Named Desire about? Everyone will answer differently, drawing out what resonates most with them. On the surface, of course, there is the social and political conflict of the two Americas in 1947. The Old South, with its ladies and gentlemen, is embodied by the dreamy Blanche DuBois, who believes in lofty ideals and values refined manners. The new America, with its immigrant working class, is represented by Stanley Kowalski, who believes only in force and pragmatism.

But the play runs much deeper. The social and ideological clash between Blanche and Stanley is only its frame. The deeper you go into this world, the more you realize that A Streetcar Named Desire is, in truth, about loneliness, heartbreaking losses, traumas that won't release their grip, betrayal, and domestic violence.

If Tennessee Williams lures the reader in with a romantic title and leaves room for hope along the way, John Neumeier spoils the ending in the very first scene. The ballet begins where the play ends — on a bed in a psychiatric hospital.

When the audience enters the theatre, the curtain is already up. A single overturned chair lies on the stage — the most important symbol in the ballet. Neumeier stages the opening with his signature dramaturgical device, breaking the invisible wall between the audience and the dancers.

As in The Lady of the Camellias or Nijinsky, this open-curtain beginning bends the flow of time. The device makes it possible to dance the past, to travel from the final point of a life backwards through it. That is why all the terrible episodes of the heroine's life will be shown in fragments, like flashes of memory.

A Streetcar Named Desire opens in complete silence. For five minutes, the entire house sits frozen alongside Blanche DuBois (Sophie Martin), trying to grasp how her life could have arrived at this point.

Watching the beautiful, refined Blanche — dressed in an elegant white outfit, perched on the edge of a shabby cot — an image from another ballet inevitably surfaces. On just such a white bed with railings and casters, little Clara, dressed in the same white, once travelled to the magical Land of Sweets in George Balanchine's canonical Nutcracker.

Doesn't Blanche DuBois, with her fantasies and her belief in a prince charming, remind you of Clara? Only A Streetcar Named Desire is the truthful, grown-up version. This is what happens to naïve girls in the real world when they hold on to their belief in magic.

Nutcracker. Photo by Paul Kolnik

The image intensifies when three men descend upon Blanche, tearing her apart in crude sexual acts. None of them wants to marry her; none cares for her feelings or her dreams. These three figures — a collective image of all the men Blanche has met in her life — will continue to darken even her brightest memories like a stain. They mutter lewd comments during her wedding, and stand as unseen presences during her date with Mitch.

This is how Neumeier shows that our pains and traumas grow inside us like tumours, devouring everything around them. In Act II, the heroine will bring to New Orleans not only her possessions but the baggage of her traumas, which will hide beneath her bed in the shape of ghosts.

Neumeier handles the play's most difficult and harrowing episodes with mastery — and no wonder, given that the choreographer holds a bachelor's degree in literature and theatre studies. The suicide of Allan — Blanche's husband, who was in an intimate relationship with another man — is a case in point. In the play, Blanche, upon discovering the affair, tells her husband in despair that she despises him. Allan immediately shoots himself in the head. That cruel sentence and the gunshot will haunt Blanche for the rest of her life.

Neumeier visualizes Blanche's contempt as a recurring slap to the face. And at the climax of their bitter exchange, it is Blanche's outstretched hand — pointed like a pistol at Allan's temple — that fires the fatal shot into his head. This is exactly how Blanche will remember the event for the rest of her life.

This weight of those who have left is something Neumeier also materializes in the set design. Chairs in the ballet form a kind of scaffolding that holds up not only the metaphorical structure of the family estate Belle Reve, but the heroine's entire world. Overturned chairs are an image of those who have left us. It is no surprise, then, that the ballet opens with an overturned chair.

The story of Blanche DuBois is a story of countless losses, betrayals, and overturned chairs. It seems that absolutely everyone betrays her. First, her parents and relatives, who failed to prepare the young woman for a new era that would sweep away everything in its path. In dying, the old generation took with them not only the last of the family money and Blanche's hopes for the future, but the old world itself, with all its codes. Then Blanche is betrayed by her husband — the man whose love she will carry through her entire life.

But the deepest blow comes from her own sister, Stella. In the ballet, Neumeier simplifies this figure, reducing her to animal passion in her duets with her husband. In the play, it is more complex. First, Stella leaves her sister and the family estate — and at this very moment, the first chair falls on stage. Then she betrays every code of Belle Reve by marrying the crude and primitive Stanley Kowalski.

But Stella commits her gravest betrayal in the play's final pages, when she chooses to believe her husband over her own sister. Instead of leaving with Blanche, she stays. It is hard even to imagine how Stella will go on sleeping in the same bed in which her husband raped Blanche while Stella was giving birth to his child.

And yet — can we condemn her? Hardly. Stella's choice is the appearance of choice, not a real one. Tennessee Williams captures with great precision the position of a woman in 1947 and her total dependence on a man.

Although Neumeier removes Stella's moral dilemma from the ballet, in the second act he registers with great accuracy the brutal atmosphere of a male world, and a woman's place within it. For several minutes, the stage doesn't stop pounding — the claps of jazz dancers' hands, the dull thuds of a boxing sparring match between Stanley and Mitch. The mounting rhythm makes you uneasy and anxious: male physical aggression here exists as a natural environment, in its own right. Williams shows clearly in the play where this aggression is heading next — and Neumeier understands this too: the same force with which Stanley hits the punching bag will, by nightfall, come down on Stella and Blanche.

The danced portrait of Stanley Kowalski (Olgert Collaku) illustrates the play's dialogue in granular detail. Several times in the course of the performance, he beats his fists against his chest — a gesture so primal that it immediately recalls Blanche's reflections that Stanley behaves like an animal: he eats, moves, and speaks like an animal. Thousands of years of evolution have passed him by, and everything humanity has gained in that time — art, poetry, music, tenderness — remains inaccessible to him.

With the same chilling precision, Neumeier stages the rape scene. In Williams's play, it fits into a single stage direction; in the Oscar-winning film, the camera bashfully looks away. Neumeier offers no such privilege. He forces us to live through the violence from beginning to end.

To intensify the effect, Neumeier repeatedly brings his dancers downstage, right to the edge of the proscenium, almost into the auditorium. The choreographer turns the audience into accomplices: we become those very neighbours who hear the screams through the thin walls of the New Orleans tenement, understand everything, and do nothing. The silence of the auditorium rhymes with the silence of society.

For Stanley Kowalski, sex is domination — which is why he repeatedly grabs Blanche by the legs, or clamps and twists her between his own. He literally crushes her lifeless body beneath him. Then he rises, throws a clenched fist into the air, and pounds his chest once more. Thousands of years of evolution. And here is the result.

A Streetcar Named Desire has none of the romance or melodrama that usually seduces audiences. And although Neumeier's heroines are nearly always tragically doomed, each of them is passionately and tenderly loved. Blanche, by contrast, is utterly alone. From the very start she has no choice, no man willing to share her hard lot or shield her from misfortune. No, Mitch is no Armand and no Vronsky. He is not ready to fight for his love.

When, at the end of the ballet, the trembling Blanche — after everything she has lived through — returns to her starting point on the hospital cot, a line from Anna Akhmatova's Requiem inevitably surfaces in the mind: "Could I ever have foretold, mocker and favourite of all your friends, joyful sinner of Tsarskoye Selo, what would befall your life?" Akhmatova, who, like Blanche DuBois, belonged to another world and bore witness to history and to a new political order, wrote those lines in Russia in 1938. But Blanche DuBois in 1947 America would surely have understood them.

John Neumeier first staged A Streetcar Named Desire in Stuttgart in 1983 — and, regrettably, the ballet's urgency has only persisted to this day. A Streetcar Named Desire is not the kind of ballet you return to in order to compare different casts — but it is the kind of ballet that everyone should see at least once. What more effective inoculation against violence could there be than an honest conversation about it through art?

In closing, congratulations are due to the dancers and the entire company of Ballett am Rhein on a remarkable premiere. Every dancer in this production was exactly where they belonged. In the tender, anxious Sophie Martin, one could glimpse a shadow of Vivien Leigh. And Olgert Collaku as Stanley Kowalski was so terrifying and brutal that, by the end of the performance, every glance he cast sent shivers down the spine.

A Streetcar Named Desire runs at the Deutsche Oper am Rhein in May, June, and July. Don't miss it.

Text: Margarita Makhrina

Photo: Ingo Schaefer, Daniel Senzek