Written for the programme of A Streetcar Named Desire, Theatre Cocoon, Tokyo, December 2017.
Letter from Tokyo: ‘The moth...’
“There is something about her uncertain manner as well as her white clothes, that suggests a moth”
And this was Tennessee Williams working title for A Streetcar Named Desire. The moth; delicate, desiccated, off-white, gossamer thin, a little dusty, inexplicably attracted to the naked flame that will set it ablaze for a brief, spectacular moment and leave behind a scorched husk to be smudged by a finger tip in to dust on the kitchen table. Moths fly in straight lines in relation to the stars and the moon but they’re sent in to a tailspin of confusion by bright, artificial light, inexorably drawn to it, but tap, tap, tapping gently on the glass of the bulb - outside the object of their mysterious desire.
The fall of the house of Du Bois is precipitated by the “epic fornications” of their grandes dames et messieurs and the last of their number are drawn to the seedy neon grandeur of the French Quarter and the heat of Stanley Kowalski, Blanche flying straight for her Stella. Stella for star. And they are all consumed in the heat. But that didn’t satisfy Tennessee Williams. They are all consumed in the heat. Blanche, Stanley, Stella, Mitch, and poor Allan Grey.
He called his masterpiece “A Streetcar Named Desire”.
This thing, this mysterious thing. Desire.
It’s not a first class carriage. It’s not remotely exclusive. It’s a low, dirty form of public transport that anyone can ride on, its progress unstoppable, it runs on rails, unable to dodge anything that gets in its path, ferrying its benighted passengers from Elysian Fields to Cemetery. From the sweet, sweet lips of a seventeen year old boy to destitution. From your sister’s husband to the madhouse.
Williams believed that Freud had much to teach about the drives towards sex and death that so obsessed his playwrighting. Freud moved beyond his theory of the pleasure principle when he observed children play ‘house’ in the playgrounds of primary school over and over again, he believed, to attempt to tame the profound trauma of being summarily taken from their homes and thrown in to society. These children drawn back to their foundational trauma, reliving it, circling the flame, trying to understand this thing.
So it is with Blanche, ejected summarily from her home and her way of life, salving the wound by responding to the siren song of the several soldiers night after night on the lawn of Belle Reve, her beautiful dream. Belle Reve. Blanche, white, whiteness, haunted by her family’s expectation of her, haunted by her savage hypocrisy toward Allan Grey, when society looked on in moral opprobrium from Blanche to Allan and back to Blanche, as she told Allan publicly that he disgusted her to turn away from the white light of her shame. Allan so ashamed that he shoots himself in the mouth.
So she relives and relives, like the children in the playground, playing house, picking away at everyone’s shame, Stella’s animal desire, her new low circumstances, her guilt at leaving Belle Reve, Stanley’s animality, his aggression borne of his strong animal instincts being thwarted by having to live in ‘civilisation’; moth-like dancing from flame to flame. Wanting death. Trying to prettify a world that she knows can never be beautiful with paper lampshades. Her sex wanting one thing and her mind powerless, brittle as crepe paper in opposition. But then there’s Mitch. Out of nowhere. “Sometimes - there’s God - so quickly”… She hadn’t counted on the possibility of forgiveness. Divine forgiveness. Human forgiveness. Among the heat and the sweat and the booze and the death. It’s there. But still there’s something in her that wants to kill it.
Science can’t explain it. Moths watch other moths tumble out of the air and yet they continue to dance on the edge of their own obsession. Trying to understand it, trying to tame it, trying to touch it. Endlessly, inexorably, drawn to it. Heart pumping. With a vague remembrance that the stars are in the heavens while their paper thin wings lick at the flames.
Great works of art find a form for the unsayable, the most difficult to explain aspects, of being alive. Average ones find a form for the eminently sayable. Streetcar is a great play because in it, Williams starts to draw up a map of the dark unknown continents of our drives, his lines imperfect but immutably recognisable. In his dialogue he goes beyond Freud to suggest that it’s the obverse, not quite the opposite of death that is desire. This is territory that Williams explores for the rest of his career - watching his fellow humans ‘try to spell God’s name with the wrong alphabet blocks’. This play sets the agenda for twentieth century drama, and may well be its greatest flowering, others explore brilliantly the territory that Williams has revealed, but few discover new land. I admire Arthur Miller, but when I leave an evening in the theatre with him, I feel like I want to apologise to him for not being up to snuff as a human. I don’t want my name. You can have it. Honestly. I doubt I’d do very much heroic with a musket pointed in my face. I’d have seen any devil you’d cared to name. Christ, I buy my clothes in the full knowledge that they’re made by child slaves in Bangladesh. When I leave an evening in the company of Tennessee Williams, I get a sense of another broken human telling me that it’s ok. It’s ok you dirty bugger. It’s ok you filthy angel. It’s ok. It’s a cesspool at the minute, but by God, we’ve got each other.
© Phillip Breen