© Bernd Weissbrod Stuttgart 'Streetcar' reviews Stuttgart 'Endstation' reviews 'Streetcar Named Desire' reviews Ferri in reviews Reilly in reviews recent Stuttgart reviews more Angela Reinhardt reviews

The play is set in New Orleans, where Blanche comes to visit her sister Stella who is married to Stanley Kowalski, a sensual and brutish man. The troubled and seedy past of the ageing Southern belle is revealed only during the play: Blanche lost the family plantation home Belle Reve and then got involved with many different men. Neumeier decided to show Blanche's past in the first part of the ballet, a silent, slow act that unfolds to Prokofjev's "Visions fugitives" like behind a veil. In fact the whole action is a flashback, as the ballet begins with the terrified Blanche sitting on a hospital bed, haunted by her memories: Her fiancée Allan, a sensible and tender young man, is in love with another man and shoots himself when Blanche discovers his feelings. This shot, that will be repeated often during the ballet, is the turning point in Blanche's life from where on everything is going down - her sister leaves for New Orleans, Belle Reve is falling apart, Blanche's old relatives die one after the other.

The second part, the New Orleans act, is totally different in pace, music and movement. It's set to Alfred Schnittke's First Symphony, a polystylistic and intense, sometimes violent piece with citations of classical and jazz music. The corps de ballet, which moved as slow, dream-like couples through the beautiful setting of Belle Reve, now looks like in jazz ballet, the women in stylish dresses of the fifties, the men as sailors or in jeans and T-shirts. Each one of them has a different choreography of his own, and together they make up the frantic, hot town of New Orleans. Blanche arrives, the fragile beauty all in white. Stanley doesn't like Blanche and her eccentric behaviour but he makes approaches to her - just because he can do it, because he feels how fascinated she is by his looks and animal magnetism. Stanley's friend Mitch falls in love with Blanche (instead of playing cards, Stanley and Mitch have a boxing match in the ballet), but Stanley destroys the relationship by showing Mitch her seedy past. As the tension and the hatred between Blanche and Stanley keep growing, he finally rapes her one night. In the play the curtain falls over this scene, but Neumeier shows the whole rape as a fierce battle between the two dancers. After the rape, Blanche finally slips into a world of her own: she puts on her wedding dress and a tiara, the Belle Reve couples appear before her eyes. She has gone mad and only agrees to come with the nurse that Stanley brings along when she sees the doctor: he is danced by the same dancer as her fiancée, and he comforts her with the same tender movement to her forehead as Allan used to do. The end is like the beginning: Blanche sitting on her asylum bed, her hands clinging to her mouth in terror.

Alessandra Ferri as Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire
© Bernd Weissbrod

"A Streetcar Named Desire" (or "Endstation Sehnsucht" in German), is a complicated ballet because it is very dense - different actions take place at the same time, different symbols are used through the whole ballet. Blanche's story is not always told chronologically, sometimes the future is anticipated or characters from the past move through the present. Allan for example comes back as a newspaper boy and as the doctor, or the three men which stand for Blanche's seedy past sit at the side of the stage during the whole first act, waiting for her and luring her. But every movement has a meaning, there are no superfluous steps or scenes - no corps de ballet dancing where the action stops, no long love pas de deux, no pure dance. Neumeier's ballet is a masterpiece of narration by movement, very similar to what Matthew Bourne is doing in "Play without words", but more compact and concentrated, and on a higher choreographic level. Neumeier's dramatic gift (and he is one of the best narrators in ballet I know) finds a seamless, direct transformation into choreography: for once the choreographer Neumeier is equal to the brilliant narrator Neumeier. Compared for example to "Death in Venice", his newest work that premiered in Hamburg in December, this twenty year old Tennessee Williams ballet looks so much more modern than what Neumeier is doing today - it does not have the typical Neumeier mannerisms, it does not give a big solo to every supporting role just for the sake of making the dancer dance, it does not repeat a good idea over and over. In "A Streetcar Named Desire" he filtered out the pure essence of the drama, turned it into dance, and the effect is breathtaking in every meaning of the word.

With Alessandra Ferri, who is dancing for the first time in Stuttgart, Neumeier found exactly the right cast for Blanche: a dramatic ballerina in the tradition of Marcia Haydée, a dancer with an expressive, sometimes screaming body. With her nervous and sensible hands, Ferri's Blanche constantly shifts between living a coquettish lie and the sheer terror of baring her soul. She has moments of utmost tragedy - the tired look on her face when she finds some peace from all her acting in Mitch's arms, her transfigured and enraptured gaze when she goes mad. Her only flaw in this great performance: she is not Marcia Haydée, whose overpowering intensity has defined the role for everybody who ever saw her.

Stanley Kowalski is danced by the Canadian Jason Reilly, one of Reid Anderson's brilliant young male principals. With only 24 years (at little more than half the age of Richard Cragun when he created the role) Reilly can absolutely hold his own against the world star Ferri, standing up to her intensity in every moment. He is a very complete dancer, an excellent partner with effortless lifts, he has high jumps, long legs, a fine classical technique - and he is a good actor, showing here the rare ability to play dark characters as well as Siegfried and Romeo. Unlike Richard Cragun's malicious, almost calculating Stanley, Reilly plays the part a bit more like an animal (sometimes to much like an animal), but you never feel like he had to understand that jazz feeling or Stanley's lascivious self-confidence - he just knows it. Reilly is a dancer with a great future.

All the other dancers of the Stuttgart Ballet have also gained enormously by working with John Neumeier on this revival: you see some people doing things you thought they could never do. Ivan Gil Ortega clearly goes beyond his limits in Mitch's bitter disappointment about Blanche, and Mikhail Kaniskin, a dancer with a crystal-clear Russian technique, suddenly proves to be a sensitive and very touching actor as Blanche's fiancée Allan. Marijn Rademaker is equally strong as his friend. Only Katja Wünsche is not quite as convincing in her role as the original Stella was twenty years ago. The corps de ballet is full of energy and everybody know his exact motivation for every single step. After "Lulu", the first full-length story ballet by Stuttgart's house choreographer Christian Spuck, created in December after Frank Wedekind's drama, the Stuttgart ballet has another big success with a another fierce tragedy about a dubious woman. Who said there are no more good story ballets?