‘A Streetcar Named Desire’ is a real pleasure to teach.

And Elia Kazan’s 1951 film masterpiece (starring Marlon Brando opposite Vivien Leigh) is a great opportunity to look for insight on the stage, not just on the page.

We swoon at Brando’s ‘Stanley’ – but that’s the trap. Charisma can disguise cruelty. 

Whilst Blanche clings to a fading, aristocratic myth of refinement, Stanley embodies a raw, industrial modernity, pragmatic, immigrant, impatient with illusion. And, of course, intensely patriarchal. The apartment becomes a pressure chamber in which old hierarchies and new energies collide. Stella’s baby is the unanswered question at the end of the play: what kind of America comes next?

Is there anything of Williams in the play?

Perhaps his diffidence and courtly manners are reflected in Mitch (Karl Malden in Kazan’s film), but there are echoes in Blanche, too. Her fate is uncomfortably reminiscent of his sister Rose’s – something he never quite forgave himself for not preventing.

Over to you: Team Blanche, or Team Stella?

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Reading makes us see what we’ve stopped noticing.