![]() Trapped … Vanessa Kirby, Gillian Anderson and Ben Foster in A Streetcar Named Desire. And in a New York show, Vanessa Kirby got her leg caught in the revolve. There are times when Blanche wears six-inch heels and at a certain point I had to see a chiropractor because I stepped off and yanked my hip. What effect did the revolving stage have on your performance ? At the beginning we were all really dizzy until we acclimatised. Technically, we understood that it would almost be like watching a film through a lens so that the audience could sometimes only hear our words and not see us and at other times be close up as we came closer towards them, which added something powerful to watching it. Even at the end when Blanche is taken away, the stage continues to go round because Stella is still trapped in the system. It starts the real action and becomes a merry-go-round that none of them can get off. The minute she takes the sip the stage is moving she feels it and the audience feels it too. What was the idea behind this perpetual movement? The movement starts when Blanche takes her first sip of alcohol on stage to calm her nerves. Magda Willi ’s set is designed on a revolving stage and the drama never stops moving. Blanche uses it to the nth degree but it is also Stella’s currency. Sex came into both their lives at an early age – what was expected of them, what they were used for and the discovery that their sexuality was their currency. Out of that came a whole new level between the sisters – not only the competition and jealousy between them but the guilt, love, shame and a gamut of other emotions. Benedict Andrews, who was the most fantastic director for this, got it on a deep, cellular level and created a platform where you could just keep ploughing through and investing in the joy and complexity of it. ![]() Firstly, there’s something absolutely extraordinary about the complexity of Williams’s drama which has so many layers. Was there a focus on the sisters? I felt like I knew the play inside out until I started working on this production, which peels away the onion layers on all the relationships between its characters. A Streetcar Named Desire is often seen as a play about sexuality but the Young Vic production draws our eye to the sibling bond between Blanche DuBois and her sister, Stella.
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