“Cruelty … and Sweaty Intimacy”: The Reception of the Spanish Premiere of A Streetcar Named Desire

Abstract

The circumstances surrounding the national premieres of Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire reflect not only the play's vibrant theatre life but also the particular culture that responded to it, validating past or anticipating future critical interpretations. Within two years of the Broadway (and world) premiere of Streetcar in December 1947, the play had been staged in Austria, Belgium, Holland, France (adapted by Jean Cocteau), Italy (with sets by Franco Zeffirelli), England (directed by Sir Laurence Olivier), Switzerland (with a translation by poet Berthold Viertel), and Sweden (directed by Ingmar Bergman). In March of 1950, Streetcar premiered in U.S.-occupied Germany, at Pfozheim. The premiere of the play in some of the former Communist Bloc countries followed in the 1950s or early 1960s. Streetcar opened on the same day—December 21, 1957—at Torun and Wroclaw (Breslau in pre-War Germany), Poland, and in Warsaw the subsequent April of 1958. The Czechoslovakian premiere of Streetcar was in November 1960 in Moravia and its Hungarian debut occurred shortly after.