Un Tramway de Warlikowski at Odéon-Théâtre de l’Europe

Text: Florian Holtzente

The opening scene of Krzysztof Warlikowski’s adaptation of Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire, playing now at the Odéon, is clearly trying to say something.  Or rather, scream it so loudly that it’s hard to make out exactly what it is.  My hypothesis, which might not be the only correct one, is that in the subtext of his his staging, Warlikowski is mouthing, for all who care to listen: "Fuck you, Elia Kazan." 

And I understand the sentiment. Streetcar is one of the most recognizable plays of the 20th century for spectators on both sides of the Atlantic, and at the same time, one of the most deeply anchored in its time and place: the mid-century American South, caught in a tailspin of decadence and standing on the precipice of social upheaval.  And Kazan’s famous film adaptation also makes Streetcar one of the hardest plays to mould into a director’s vision: his dusty sets, inhabited by Marlon Brando and Vivien Leigh, have solidified in our cultural memory, and occluded almost any other possible interpretation of the piece.

Warlikowski’s brutal first 20 minutes seem designed to burn all of Hollywood’s mid-century realism off of the mental retina.  He opens by placing the deranged Southern belle Blanche (Isabelle Huppert) on a stool in her underwear, groaning and convulsing like a junkie, while spitting her lines into a microphone and twisting her whole body into ghastly spasms. 

She delivers the famous “they told me to take a streetcar named Desire” monologue as if she’s on the verge of vomiting, paralyzed in a hideous limbo, enclosed within a huge glass-and-steel box, stylized out of reality and, at the same time, made revoltingly physical.  It’s awful for the first few minutes, then strangely enthralling.  It wipes the palette clean of any Streetcar you might have imagined (and you wouldn’t be the only one: originally called Un Tramway nommé désir, the play’s title has been changed to Un Tramway after the Tennessee Williams Estate refused to allow Warlikowski to use the full title for his version).

What follows is, at least at first, powerful.  Warlikowski is a genius at making actors move onstage and interact with one another, and every lit cigarette feels like a knife-edge the characters have to traverse in order to really touch one another.  Huppert has a genius for psychological chiaroscuro: she alternates unspeakable violence and agitation with the eeriest moments of calm - moments that are so taunt and full of energy that they almost feel like threats.  One false move, and she’s back on that sadistic stool, or staggering around in one of her hideous 80’s dresses, looking like a tragic cream puff or window curtain, giddy and on the verge of an abyss.  The other actors are strong too, especially Andrzej Chyra, who makes Stanley Kowalski his own with an ugliness that has nothing of Brando’s suave brutishness.  In this version he’s a real Pole, not a Polish-American (and Chyra is actually a real Pole; he speaks no French, and had to learn his role by memory), but in Warlikowski’s tight fist and far-out, largely location-less concept, it works.       

What doesn’t work is almost everything that follows the first forty minutes.  There is a mad gay tango sequence with an actor in a Pompadour, a Salomé interlude and some slightly unseemly business with the Virgin of Guadeloupe.  Someone narrates a passage from Plato’s Symposium while Huppert dances around in a synthetic full-body sheath, looking to all the world like a purple spandex tornado.  And later, for those who haven’t quite had enough, comes an electronica rendition of the Monteverdi madrigal Tancredi e Clorinda, which narrates the combat between a Crusader knight and Muslim warrioress taken from a 16th-century Italian epic.  (For the record, this last touch was actually rather brilliant, but came too late in the battle to save the troops).

The show is loud, long, and overstimulating, with plenty of 80s rock music and harsh neon lights.  What’s unfortunate, however, is that in spite of this mess, there’s something truly brilliant and unsettling about Warlikowski’s theater – about his ability to draw emotion out of his actors, and to tap dark undercurrents from the enormous range of his erudition.  But he can’t control himself, and his power as an artist is lost in the deluge of his own ideas thrown together onstage. 

At its worst, this deconstructionist Tramway is insufferably condescending.  But at its best, there’s something legitimate about its extremity, something you might call a study in the unbearable flamboyance of anguish, which can be both public and private, unleashed on everyone around, or bottled up tightly inside.  The reception the night I went was, to say the least, mixed.  But maybe that’s a good thing.  It’s not every night that an audience cares enough about what they’ve seen to both boo and applaud as loudly as they can.          

Un Tramway, until April 3
Odéon-Théâtre de l'Europe
Place de l'Odéon,
75006 Paris
Métro : Odéon
Tél. : 01-44-85-40-40
Tuesday to Saturday at 8pm, Sundat at 3pm