Rave reviews for ‘too beautiful’ Weisz

British film actress Rachel Weisz, star of The Mummy and About a Boy, has received glowing reviews for her London stage performance as Blanche DuBois (above right) in Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire, with the Daily Telegraph’s theatre critic Charles Spencer calling it "by some distance, the best Streetcar I have seen".
 
Weisz rises to the challenge of playing DuBois "magnificently", says Spencer, who admits he had thought the Oscar-winning actress would "almost certainly fail" in the role of the fragile widow who leaves home to join her sister and brother-in-law in New Orleans.  

"She has had relatively little stage experience and surely, I reasoned, she was too young, and too beautiful, to play the now fading, hard-drinking and wildly promiscuous Southern belle on the edge of complete breakdown," Spencer writes in his four-star review.

The Guardian’s Michael Billington, noting that the role was made famous by Vivien Leigh (left, with Marlon Brando) in Elia Kazan’s 1951 film version, also gave the Donmar Warehouse production, directed by Rob Ashford, four stars. "What Weisz brings to the role is a quality of desperate solitude touched with grace," he said.
 
Many of the critics focus on Weisz's beauty and relative youth, though as Michael Coveney of the Independent explains, the author specified her age as about 30, so Weisz, now 39, can hardly be accused of being too young for the part.

However, Coveney went out on a limb to criticise her performance. "Weisz starts vague and wispy, with that glinting, cunning deceptiveness of the dedicated drinker," he wrote, "but she misses an awful lot of the role's cutting cruelty and sheer drag queen bitchiness."
 
It is Weisz's third play for the Donmar. Last year she appeared in another Williams play, Suddenly Last Summer, as well as Noel Coward's Design for Living. A Streetcar Named Desire runs until October 3.
 
WHAT THEY ARE SAYING:
 
Charles Spencer, the Daily Telegraph: "The role of Blanche DuBois has defeated many a celebrated actress. Over the years I have seen Jessica Lange, Glenn Close, and the late Natasha Richardson attempt to come to terms with Blanche's extraordinary poignancy, variety and depth, and fine actresses though they are, or were, none quite penetrated its heart."
 
Benedict Nightingale, the Times: "Let me be ungentlemanly enough to be gentlemanly about Rachel Weisz. Her performance as the cracked belle at the centre of Tennessee Williams’s great play is so impressive that I must point out that in one vital respect she’s miscast. Why does her Blanche DuBois feel impelled to hide her age and her looks from anyone, least of all the nice but dim suitor played by Barnaby Kay? Even when she’s clinging precariously to the remnants of her sanity this gorgeous, gifted actress is a bright light in a dark world."

Michael Coveney, the Independent: "The good thing is that Weisz is so aptly young – Williams specifies her age as about 30, and her sister Stella, beautifully played here by Ruth Wilson, as 25-ish. This is how it must have come across with Vivien Leigh in the first London production." ·