“Oh! You Do Have a Bathroom! First Door to the Right at the Top of the Stairs?” Bathrooms in the Staging of A Streetcar Named Desire
Maurin, Frédéric
“Oh! You Do Have a Bathroom! First Door to the Right at the Top of the Stairs?” Bathrooms in the Staging of A Streetcar Named Desire - 2011.
20
In A Streetcar Named Desire, the bathroom is located outside the action and offstage. It delineates the unrepresented part of a play written by a playwright who has long been despised by the alternative theatre. But at least four contemporary directors focused on this blind spot and brought it to the fore or even centre stage. In a Japanesque environment, Lee Breuer treated the bathroom as both the place of privacy and the background of threat (2011). Videotaping what took place within and projecting the images on a monitor without enabled Frank Castorf to show on stage what was behind the scenes and to ironically play on the interaction between those images and the real (2000). Krzysztof Warlikowski blurred the definition and the meaning of a long corridor where sanitary equipment was yet fully visible (2010). Finally, the bathtub exhibited on stage by Ivo van Hove served as a trigger for a highly physical, sexual production (1995/1999). In these four instances, focusing on the hidden, “forbidden” bathroom may help to redeem Tennessee Williams by wrenching him from the psychological-realistic tradition his name is still attached to.
“Oh! You Do Have a Bathroom! First Door to the Right at the Top of the Stairs?” Bathrooms in the Staging of A Streetcar Named Desire - 2011.
20
In A Streetcar Named Desire, the bathroom is located outside the action and offstage. It delineates the unrepresented part of a play written by a playwright who has long been despised by the alternative theatre. But at least four contemporary directors focused on this blind spot and brought it to the fore or even centre stage. In a Japanesque environment, Lee Breuer treated the bathroom as both the place of privacy and the background of threat (2011). Videotaping what took place within and projecting the images on a monitor without enabled Frank Castorf to show on stage what was behind the scenes and to ironically play on the interaction between those images and the real (2000). Krzysztof Warlikowski blurred the definition and the meaning of a long corridor where sanitary equipment was yet fully visible (2010). Finally, the bathtub exhibited on stage by Ivo van Hove served as a trigger for a highly physical, sexual production (1995/1999). In these four instances, focusing on the hidden, “forbidden” bathroom may help to redeem Tennessee Williams by wrenching him from the psychological-realistic tradition his name is still attached to.
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