Royal Exchange

September 2016 

 

 

Director | Sarah Frankom

Writer | Tennessee Williams 

Set Design | Fly Davis

Lighting Designer | Jack Knowles

Sound Designer | Peter Rice 

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CAST

Ben Batt

Michelle Butterly

Sandra Cole

Sharon Duncan-Brewster

Etta Fusi

Rueben Johnson

Youssef Kerkour

Reece Noi

Maxine Peake

Ryan Pope

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"Maxine Peake has the most eloquent wrists. It’s the little physical details that really make her Blanche DuBois complete: the way she points her toes and crosses her ankles, the way she folds one hand across her back, the poise with which she wields a cigarette."

**** The Stage 

"It helps that Frankcom suggests Blanche is trapped in a living nightmare. On her arrival in New Orleans on her doomed visit to the Kowalskis – sister Stella and her husband, Stanley – Blanche is caught in the midst of a frightening swirl of activity. Peter Rice’s sound design constantly fills the air with throbs, hums and the clang of distant streetcars, while Jack Knowles’s lighting is full of sudden vibrating colour shifts. It is also typical of a phantasmagoric evening that Blanche is shadowed by not one but three figures all bedecked in death-haunted roses.."

**** The Guardian