Premiering on Broadway in 1947, Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire is the tale of a faded Southern belle, trying to avoid falling off life’s precipice with airs and graces, lies and liquor.

It’s been presented on stage and screen countless times. So most will come to this new production with expectations formed by everything from the 1951 film with Vivien Leigh and Marlon Brando, to STC’s 2009 take starring Cate Blanchett.

No doubt mindful of this, MTC’s Artistic Director Anne-Louise Sarks gives the company’s heritage play for the 2024 season a classic-with-a-twist interpretation.

Melbourne Theatre Company’s A Streetcar Named Desire. Photo © Pia Johnson

This new production’s setting is conventional: post-World War II in a poor New Orleans neighbourhood, where Blanche DuBois washes up to stay with her sister, Stella, and “common” brother-in-law Stanley Kowalski.

The most notable twist is Nikki Shiels’s Blanche. Instead of the fragile flotsam, tossed about by misfortune that we probably expect, she gives us a woman with a fierce life force and bitter determination under that flighty, genteel facade.