BLANCHE

” I don’t want realism, I want magic! “

– Blanche DuBois

Blanche

2019

On stage Emilia Jansson, Herman Nyby, Astrid Stenberg
Sound design Riku-Pekka Kellokoski
Photo Elvira Eilittä

Performance premiered at Theatre Academy Helsinki in February 2019. Show in Teater Viirus in May 2019. Performance is the starting point for performance collective 4 FLOORS OF WHORES:

BLANCHE is a witness to her own relentless decay in a world that constantly feeds dreams of individual success. Blanche DuBois, the main character in Tennessee Williams’ play A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), is one of the most memorable portraits in history of theatre. Williams was a petit, feminine homosexual man who had a rejecting father who called him “sissy” and “faggot”. Elia Kazan who directed the adaptation for the screen 1951 says that Blanche was a self-projection of the author. Blanche has Williams’s sexual hedonism, his impatience, love for illusion and his chronic alcoholism. Williams ascribed his mother’s and sister’s mental illness to them being sexually oppressed. The nymphomaniac Blanche becomes a hero in his fight against a puritan society.

In a messy world of poker games, bowling and fights Williams glances longingly from the outside at the bond of friendships between the straight man in the platy.Likewise himself Blanche is the alien “other” that disrupts her sister Stella’s and her brother-in-aw Stanley’s normative existence. Marlon Brando played Stanley in the movie adaptation, which gave him a cult status that has led to male actors “doing Brando” without even being aware of it.