When Tennessee Williams’s masterpiece made its London debut 60 years ago, the Public Morality Council denounced it as “salacious and pornographic”. Not coincidentally, the production was booked solid for nine months.

While no one could convict Rob Ashford’s smartly conceived revival of being lewd, it does awaken the brilliant nastiness of Williams’s writing.
At its heart is Rachel Weisz, whose performance as Blanche DuBois — a boozy tangle of disappointments, pretensions and fragile charm — proves mesmerizing.

Set in raffishly rickety Forties New Orleans, the play depicts the collision of Blanche’s archaic Southern refinements and her brother-in-law Stanley Kowalski’s crude, industrial view of life.

Episodic and morally ambiguous, it is charged with an intensity that seems almost schizophrenic.

Richly portraying the tension between dark male impulses and feminine poise, it shows as well
how vulgarity can bludgeon finer feelings into submission. Above all, it limns the destructiveness of desire. Blanche arrives on a streetcar at the cramped apartment in Elysian Fields that her sister Stella shares with Stanley.

The vehicle’s name, Desire, appears a symptom of the city’s viscous sensuality, and the “collapsible” bed in which she is expected to sleep symbolises the intriguingly uncertain social and sexual boundaries of her world — which are soon aggressively policed by Stanley.

Gallery: A Streetcar Named Desire Afterparty

Adam Cork’s music and atmospheric sound season the drama, and Christopher Oram’s emphatically vertical design, complete with an effective if worryingly wobbly spiral staircase, makes clever use of the Donmar’s intimate space.

Over three hours the drama’s concentration is powerfully sustained. Williams’s characters are voluptuaries with injured souls, and his dialogue contains moments of anguished lyricism. But even the more prosaic moments feel tense.

Elliot Cowan’s Stanley is rawly animal. He throbs with sinewy machismo. Stella says he is “a different species”.

After a somewhat uncertain start — sure of triceps, not so sure of accent — Cowan grows, conveying his volatility and energy, though he misses the note of vulnerability so memorably brought to the role by Marlon Brando.

Meanwhile Ruth Wilson’s Stella is sensitively imagined — high on the opium of lust, evasive yet compassionate. And Barnaby Kay convinces as Blanche’s admirer Mitch, an Oedipal milksop from the “spare parts department” at Stanley’s workplace.

But the key is Rachel Weisz. Spectral when we first see her, she shows her range as she shifts between sultry flirtiness, light chatter, fevered reminiscence and squawky hysteria.

Her Blanche is Cleopatra by way of Miss Havisham, deliberately constructing a succession of roles (or disguises) for herself in order to keep reality at bay. 

Some will inevitably complain that Weisz is miscast: too youthful to play Blanche — though in fact she is eight years older than the script specifies — or simply implausible as a woman condemned to fret over her faded looks. 

Yet Weisz’s interpretation of Blanche is compellingly intelligent. “I don’t want realism, I want magic,” she declares. This production has both, and makes Streetcar seem a resonantly modern tragedy.