Gillian Anderson, who played Blanche in an award-winning performance at the Young Vic theatre in London,
has returned to the role for a short film exploring those days before
Blanche’s arrival in the play. The Departure has been made for the Young
Vic series of shorts that complement the theatre’s main-house
productions.
“When Blanche first arrives at Elysian Fields [the street where
Stella lives], you have the impression that she’s a little shaky,
perhaps from travel, and hyper,” says Anderson. “You don’t have a sense
yet of the depth of loneliness or despair or financial insecurity or
tragedy that she has been through recently – and, it turns out, since
childhood. That unravels during the play as Stanley starts to ‘smoke her
out’ … She arrives in a gold dress and gold shoes, seemingly put
together. I was interested in the state she was in before she put on
that armour and that facade and knocked on her sister’s door.”
The Departure is set in two locations that are unseen in Williams’s
play but exist almost as characters in their own right: Belle Reve, once
the family’s plantation home, and the seedy Flamingo hotel where
Blanche attains notoriety. “When we first see her [in The Departure],
she is coming back to Belle Reve from a funeral and you get the sense
that it’s the last of the lot. She’s worn out and weighed down by the
loss of her family,” says Anderson. “She moves on to the Flamingo hotel,
where she is kicked out after a dalliance with an underaged boy and she
might be arrested for it. People have turned on her.”
The film was shot on location at a “warehouse-slash-Georgian house”
in Bermondsey, south London, days after Streetcar finished its acclaimed
run at the Young Vic in September 2014. It was written, at Anderson’s
suggestion, by the author Andrew O’Hagan
who calls Anderson “the most intelligent actress of her generation”.
“What’s great about Andrew’s writing,” says the star, “is it upholds
[Blanche’s] attempt at maintaining her own dignity through denial.”
Anderson, who previously directed herself in an episode of The X Files,
is also the director of The Departure. She says the film is “like a
curious study of a character in a period of time” and that it was
designed to retain a “theatrical feel” and capture the “magic realist”
element of Williams’s writing – “moments in time that are suspended ...
not otherworldly but suspended somehow, in between reality and
non-reality”.
As she returns to the character of Blanche DuBois in the short film The Departure, Gillian Anderson recalls the Young Vic's celebrated production of A Streetcar Named Desire, performed on a revolving stage and directed by Benedict Andrews in London in 2014.
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