Ever since Marlon Brando was catapulted to stardom in the 1947 Broadway debut of A Streetcar named Desire, the play has been a big-name draw for big-name actors.
Cate Blanchett and Rachel Weisz received unanimous plaudits for their performances in the work. Vivien Leigh won multiple gongs and the unreserved admiration of the writer himself.
Now, in a Parisian reworking of Tennessee Williams's classic tale of love and loathing, Isabelle Huppert has become the latest star to take up her seat on the streetcar. But, according to French critics, the award-winning actor has missed the stop for acclaim and is careering uncontrollably towards ridicule.
Cast in the role of Blanche Dubois, the southern belle teetering on the edge of madness in the oppressive society of 1940s America, red-headed Huppert is receiving some of the worst reviews of her career for her lead role in Un Tramway, a liberal reinterpretation of the drama – which Williams's estate deemed rather too liberal to keep the original title.
According to Le Monde, the actor – known for her compelling portrayals of troubled women, including Emma Bovary and the sadistic heroine of The Piano Teacher – plays the demanding role of Dubois with all the authenticity of a "puppet". "You leave this Tramway asking yourself: 'What was the point? What was the point of this completely futile stylistic exercise?'," wrote critic Fabienne Darge.
Odile Quirot, writing for the Nouvel Observateur, agreed. "...You're watching a perfectly oiled machine, totally absent from her partners … Blanche Dubois is never there. It is always Isabelle Huppert and, between them and us, there is nothing."
Amid a slew of headlines making hay with one of the most iconic titles in modern thespian history – "A Streetcar named Disappointment", "A Streetcar named Boredom", "A Streetcar plunging into the Void" – critics made no secret of their crushed hopes for what they had predicted would be impressive theatre. "We were expecting a miracle and we got a disappointment," summed up Phillippe Chevilley, in Les Echos.
It was not only the French who were left unmoved by Huppert's debut last week at the Théâtre de l'Odéon in which the 54-year-old screams, vomits and writhes on the ground. Jorg von Uthmann, a reviewer for the US news service Bloomberg, gave the "over-egged" production one star out of a possible four. "It's the monumental ego trip of a star who, after decades of subtle nuances, seems to have decided to let it all hang out," he wrote.
His equally appalled counterpart at Agence France Presse added that Huppert, for all her "virtuoso" versatility, struck a hollow note. "The actor … seems permanently to be saying to the public 'Look what I can do'," the reporter remarked.
Krzysztof Warlikowski, the play's Polish director, is no stranger to controversy, having provoked the boos of an indignant audience during the opening night of his production Parsifal in Paris two years ago. Instead of starting Act III with Wagner's prelude, the Pole chose to show images from a Roberto Rossellini film.
But critics fear that, with Un Tramway, he has gone too far. While a minority of reviews did praise Huppert – last year's Cannes jury president – for her powerful, even "sublime", performance, very few warmed to the production as a whole, claiming the parts had been clumsily cast and the plot unnecessarily tinkered with.
"At the end of the premiere, a voice rang out from the balcony," concluded Uthmann. "'Pitié!' (Mercy!) The protester was drowned out by free-loaders in the orchestra seats. Never mind: He was right."
