Thomas W. Hodgkinson

Confused, unbalanced, brilliant: the Blanche Dubois of Tennessee Williams biographies

Thomas W. Hodgkinson says John Lahr’s ‘standalone’ new account of the life of the playwright, ‘Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh’, would be better if it didn't have to stand alone

Tennessee Williams on the stage set of A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) [Getty Images] 
issue 20 September 2014

Anyone for Tennessee? At a best guess, the answer to that’s yes. There’s scarcely a moment these days when there isn’t a Williams play on somewhere in the West End or along the Great White Way.

One reason for this is that he wrote such succulent roles, and I don’t mean just his steamroller leads, though for a kind of bruised or brittle actress, Blanche Dubois is as close to a female Hamlet as it gets.

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