Plays don't come much more operatic than Tennessee Williams's, so André Previn's adaptation makes sense, writes Arminta Wallace
What's this - A Streetcar Named Desire, the opera? Shouldn't that be "the play by Tennessee Williams"? Or, at the very least, "the movie starring Marlon Brando and a skin-tight T-shirt"? Well, of course, it's both. But thanks to the conductor and jazz musician André Previn, who - with librettist Philip Littell - adapted it for San Francisco Opera in 1998, A Streetcar Named Desire is now an opera as well.
Which, when you think about it, isn't so very strange. In the first place, adaptations of literary works are the bread and butter of the operatic repertoire. Think of de Beaumarchais's Marriage of Figaro, Abbé Prévost's Manon Lescaut and Alexandre Dumas's La Dame Aux Camélias, which Verdi and his librettist turned into La Traviata - not to mention a bucketload of sung Shakespeare.
And in the second place, plays don't come much more operatic than Williams's Pulitzer prize-winning 1948 tragedy. Especially as reinvented in Elia Kazan's 1951 movie, with its quasi-musical leitmotifs; Brando rhythmically smashing assorted crockery against the wall and yelling "Hey, Stella!" at the top of his not inconsiderable lungs.
"All pieces of drama are about sex, death and money, really, when you hammer it down," observes Lynne Parker, who's directing Opera Ireland's forthcoming production - and the Irish premiere - of Previn's Streetcar. And Streetcar is about those things in spades. A tense tale of domestic violence set in a steamy New Orleans, it is, says Parker, as relevant now as when it shocked post-war America to the core, its universal, timeless qualities giving it the feel of a Greek tragedy.
"It's a love triangle about people who are driven by their own natures - and you could argue that that's the basis of the Greek tragic format," she says. "It also strips down to the bare essentials the battle between - well, not just between the sexes, but between the forces of gender: between a very masculine testosterone drive and an apparently fragile but incredibly tough femininity." It's also, Parker points out, a melodrama - in the best sense.
"The music reminds me of a great many of the old Holly wood movies," she says. "I don't mean the film of the play. I mean all those old Cagney movies, the film noir of the 1930s and 1940s, which borrow hugely from 19th-century melodrama and have that element of tension which is really what melodrama is about. It's not about over-acting: it's about maintaining tension, which can come from stillness and holding a very taut sense of narrative. I think that's what the music gives it; so that's what we're working towards at the moment."
PARKER, A CO-FOUNDER and artistic director of Rough Magic Theatre Company, has just one opera to her credit - a short one-hander for Opera Theatre Company more than 10 years ago - but scored an enormous musical hit with her production of Arthur Riordan's Improbable Frequency at the 2004 Dublin Theatre Festival.
"I didn't know what I was coming into, really," she says of her temporary move to the opera scene. "Of course it's different to theatre; the performances are high-octane, for a start. I mean, just being in the rehearsal room with the singers and seeing the energy that has to go out every single moment. Now, I'm not saying actors don't expend energy. But the sheer volume of it in opera is quite different; and it has a different effect on the psychology of the characters."
Parker wasn't sure, either, whether her young Opera Ireland cast would want to go into the sort of detailed textual investigation which actors in mainstream theatre take for granted. She was, therefore, gratified to discover that actor-singers in opera seem to take it for granted these days as well.
"Tennessee Williams is very specific about the stage directions and the minutiae of behaviour, and I wasn't sure whether that was going to be useful when rehearsing an opera," she says. "But in our first week of rehearsals I've felt that we have been able to do that kind of investigation - and that it has been both necessary and useful. So in a way we're doing exactly what I would do with any play, which is to tell the story. And you have to tell the story through the behaviour of the people on stage."
PARKER IS THOROUGHLY enjoying the process - although she has no intention of moving permanently from theatre to opera. "In a curious way," she says, "theatre is moving closer to opera anyhow. What young practitioners are doing in Ireland at the moment is moving away from the kind of theatrical naturalism you would have seen in the 1990s, and much closer to the sort of formal theatrical treatment that you might see in opera. So I think there's a case for saying the two art forms might be moving closer together.
"Certainly the kind of theatre work I've found most satisfactory in recent times is work in which music is used as part of the art form. Using the text as a score, you might say."
A Streetcar Named Desire opens at the Gaiety Theatre on Nov 19 at 7.30pm, with other performances on November 21, 23 and 25. The RTÉ Concert Orchestra will be conducted by David Brophy. Puccini's classic La Bohème is the other production in Opera Ireland's season (November 18, 20, 22, 24, 26 )www.operaireland.com