Sorry, Gillian Anderson, but you've caught the wrong Streetcar

Streetcar. One word is enough to conjure an icon. Tennessee Williams’s finest play, written in the 1940s, is about a fallen woman trying to salvage her reputation before madness overwhelms her. All its horror and tension rely on the Victorian code that required a single woman to appear morally pure or to face ruin in the marriage market. The 1960s destroyed those conventions and this modern-day version feels like a lawsuit being pursued by a stammering counsel interrogating a corpse. The questions are baffling, the answers non-existent.

Director Benedict Andrews trusts his own instincts far too much and the author’s not at all. To evoke the lush, exotic heat of Louisiana, he goes for Danish minimalism and clean white surfaces. The Kowalskis live in a one-bedroom rung-on-the-ladder apartment with flatpack furniture and a fitted kitchenette. Nice little investment. Their compact home has been plonked, centre stage, on top of a narrow grey platform. Yes, grey. Just the colour to suggest the ochre humidity of a boozed-up summer in the New Orleans slums. Beneath the platform is an unseen axle that causes the apartment to twirl around the stage, sometimes clockwise, sometimes anti-clockwise, with eerie and laborious sloth. This Ouija board effect ensures that the actors are constantly being obscured by some fresh feature of the Kowalski’s flat as it lurches into view. Here’s the shower curtain. Next comes a frosted glass door. Then the back of the oven. Followed by the fire escape. Then the fridge. Then the Scandinavian bathroom and bidet. Whoops. The flat’s just changed direction. The fire escape’s coming back. Run! Overhanging the stage is a horizontal trellis, also grey, that creates a broken penumbra that disrupts the lighting.