The power of Scottish Ballet’s adaptation of Tennessee Williams’ play A Streetcar Named Desire is in its translation of the interior world into physical movement. It distils the fragmentation of a woman’s mind into her body language, with all its tells, contradictions and nuances. Although it’s a ballet with perfect narrative clarity, it is more importantly a ballet that you feel.

Marge Hendrick is eloquent and moving in the role of Blanche, Williams’ anti-heroine, on a road to complete mental annihilation. In the early scenes, where Blanche’s backstory is played out (the play drip-feeds it, but here we know from the start that Blanche has suffered tragedy and humiliation), Hendrick is frothy with youthful hope.

^{Pictures: Andy Ross}

Later she moves seamlessly between the conflicting parts of Blanche’s disintegrating personality: her aspiration to primness and grace, her insatiable appetite for sexual attention (which starts as sensual abandon and morphs by the end into something erratic and desperate) and the subtle sense that she is a fish out of water when walking into the gritty urban life of her sister Stella and brother-in-law Stanley. 

Bethany Kingsley-Garner is demure and vulnerable as Stella, a picture of stoical, keen-to-please femininity, while Royal Ballet dancer Ryoichi Hirano brings a vain, unpredictable swagger to Stanley. Peter Salem’s score sways with the heavy heat of New Orleans jazz. Nancy Meckler’s direction and Annabelle Lopez Ochoa’s choreography, meanwhile, have lost none of their impact, creating unsettling images that echo through the ballet, particularly the chorus that reappears performing disjointed drills as Blanche’s mental state deteriorates.

It’s a production that is unambiguous in its empathy for Blanche. Seeing the rawness of her mind imprinted on her body makes for a heartbreaking, harrowing journey, as we watch her hurtling towards disaster on a streetcar she cannot get off.

Scottish Ballet: A Streetcar Named Desire is on tour until Friday 30 June; reviewed at Theatre Royal, Glasgow.