Confused, unbalanced, brilliant: the Blanche Dubois of Tennessee Williams biographies

Anyone for Tennessee? At a best guess, the answer to that’s yes. There’s scarcely a moment these days when there isn’t a Williams play on somewhere in the West End or along the Great White Way.

One reason for this is that he wrote such succulent roles, and I don’t mean just his steamroller leads, though for a kind of bruised or brittle actress, Blanche Dubois is as close to a female Hamlet as it gets. In A Streetcar Named Desire, there’s also the surly stud Stanley; Stella, his sex-drunk bride; and the courtly, perspiring Mitch, bewitched by Blanche’s blend of magic.

Then think of The Glass Menagerie, which has the smothering mother Amanda, the crippled Laura, and the conflicted Tom, who abandons both to pursue his vocation as an author. When it debuted in 1944, the play caused a sensation comparable to that of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House 50 years earlier: an ode to the liberation of youth, as Doll’s House was of women, daring to present its theme in all its glaring selfishness.