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"A Streetcar Named Desire" was danced in Hamburg

The stories written by Tennessee Williams are hard to imagine retold in ballet - his characters constantly talk about the past, return to it, and the dance obliges immediate action. The artistic director of the Hamburg Ballet, John Neumeier, considers Williams one of the most important writers of the twentieth century, Williams' universe is his universe, all the characters are understandable and dear to him. It is clear that twenty-five years ago, while inventing a performance for the Stuttgart prima Marcia Heide, he could not help but remember his favorite play; nevertheless, he changed the structure of A Streetcar Named Desire thoroughly. Now his version of the story of Blanche DuBois, composed to music by Prokofiev and Schnittke, is being performed by his own troupe.

In the play by Tennessee Williams, which appeared more than once on various stages in Moscow, but is probably more familiar to most viewers from the film with Marlon Brando, the fragile woman Blanche DuBois came to a simple-minded, dusty, sun-baked quarter of New Orleans populated by proletarians - she came to your married sister. At first it seemed like they were visiting, but it quickly became clear that they were looking for shelter and, perhaps, for a long time. And sunny New Orleans, with its simple morals, crushed a woman into dust, drove her to a psychiatric hospital, that is, she, of course, was already on the way to this mournful institution, her biography included the suicide of her young husband, and a desperate life after that suicide, but the woman I tried to leave my previous nightmares behind, to warm up my soul a little next to my sister. It didn’t work out - I wasn’t saved.

In the play, the circumstances of Blanche's past life are revealed little by little, in scattered remarks, in short stories. Such fragmentation “past-present-past” is impossible in dance, and Neumayer simplified the structure. The play begins and ends in the hospital - in a room fenced off with white curtains, the heroine sits on a bed (the role went to Silvia Azzoni), motionless looking ahead. All other events are her memories, and they are built linearly.

The first act is given to youth in the Belle Reve estate - this is also the south, but the south is rich, decorous, ballroom. Light dresses for girls, formal suits for men, and gentle, light dances. Only some incredibly slow ones - this doesn’t happen in life, it only happens in a dream. This is some kind of eternal waltz, no matter what music is played - a waltz in the land of nowhere and never. The harmony of these dances is slightly disturbed only by the periodically freezing figures of two men - Blanche’s young husband (Peter Dingle) and his friend (Dario Franconi) are wary, anxious and shy away from each other; Blanche doesn’t understand what’s going on, and smiles at both of them until the men lock in a wild, desperate kiss.

The subsequent disaster at the ball is depicted by Neumeier with expressionistic fervor: Blanche instantly loses both her natural grace and her cultivated smoothness of movements. Not a girl from a good family, but an unfortunate animal that cannot cope with its arms and legs, trembling and jumping in horror. She slaps her husband, and then a shot is heard; in the play, the hero himself committed suicide; here the sound occurs at the moment when Blanche’s hand points to the hero. Not understanding, not wanting to understand what happened, Blanche lifts her husband - and again the sound of a shot, the body falls again. So in the heroine’s mind this scene is replayed one, two, three times - she sees herself as a murderer, she sets such an account for herself.

Then time seems to speed up - on happy days even dances dragged on like oriental sweets, now even funerals flash by instantly. The house is collapsing, the family is collapsing - respectable ladies and old men in black stand up one by one and settle on the floor, Blanche does not have time not only to mourn, but even to touch each of them. Azzoni perfectly conveys this stupor of monstrous stress: everything is done mechanically simply because now we need to catch the next dead man falling to the floor. And a multi-tiered chandelier slowly descends from the ceiling - and Blanche, standing under it, tries to stop it and prop it up with her palms. But what can she do against such a colossus...

Instead, a disgusting pink neon Hotel sign hangs in the air. Blanche begins a different life - if you can call it life.

Williams' play, while clarifying Blanche's past, still considered the present - what is happening in New Orleans - more important. Neumeier equalizes the rights of the two parts of the heroine's life - and in a small ballet (two hours including intermission) he devotes as much time to New Orleans as Belle Reve. Therefore, this is almost a synopsis, only the most important scenes - the hope for some possible new life with the quiet loser Mitch (Lloyd Riggins), the destruction of this hope by the sister's hubby (Carsten Jung), the rape scene by this same relative and, finally, the saving madness. But each scene is created with such energy that no details are needed.

Here is a walk with Mitch - his timid hope, clenched shoulders, an awkwardly presented bouquet of flowers, her tired, routine gestures - and suddenly there is a harmony of general movement, plastic mutual understanding. A fantastically subtle thing: the possibility of living together is spelled out, and suddenly it becomes clear that everything could work out for these people. And Mitch’s furious monologue after a friend told him the details of Blanche’s past life (who went into all seriousness after her husband’s suicide, in search of either punishment or oblivion). Mitch beats the air, beats it with his hands - he fights not with the gossip who ruined his life, not with Blanche who betrayed him (as it seems to him), but with the entire disgusting world order, in which an unearthly woman who suddenly appeared nearby in a poor quarter inevitably finds herself an ordinary whore. This protest against the universe - for a second similar to the protest of Fokine's Petrushka - explodes in the play like a bomb. What does not happen, by the way, is the scene that seems designed to shock the viewer more: the rape scene.

Carsten Jung does not have the simple-minded, predatory charm of Marlon Brando, and Neumeier's hero does not need such charm. Here Stanley Kowalski is clearly an animal, a big ape. He throws the heroine, scratches her out from under the bed where she is hiding, drags her by the leg and, it seems, will now begin to beat his chest with satisfaction, making trumpet sounds. The heroine’s plastic breaks as if she had fallen into a meat grinder, some parts of this meat grinder (Kowalski) are visible, some are invisible, but they hit no less. This is impressive, but the scene is too drawn out, from this mechanized suffering you get tired and stop perceiving the story.

But such an imbalance is understandable, natural, and, apparently, planned by the director. Lloyd Riggins, who plays the role of Mitch, is not just the premiere of the Hamburg troupe, he is the “voice” of the choreographer. Christ in the St. Matthew Passion and Aschenbach in Death in Venice are his repertoire, and Neumeier’s distribution of roles is never accidental. That is, for the choreographer, the unrealized possibility of happiness is more important than the realized catastrophe. This is probably why the Hamburg Ballet became a completely fulfilled happiness.

Anna GORDEEVA