Tennessee Williams received the Pulitzer Prize in 1948 for his gritty Broadway play, A Streetcar Named Desire. Richly characterized and simmering with violence, the story follows the demise of Blanche DuBois, a southern belle transplanted in a hostile, impoverished landscape she cannot accept. John Neumeier, the brilliant Director and Chief Choreographer of The Hamburg Ballet, created a striking adaptation of Streetcar for ballet in 1983, forgoing chronology to delve deep inside the mind of the play’s tortured heroine.

Blanche DuBois travels from Laurel, Mississippi to New Orleans to live with her sister Stella following the loss of their family plantation, Belle Reve, and the suicide of her young husband, Allan. Stella lives in a dilapidated apartment with her husband Stanley Kowalski, whose brutish behaviour is a foil for Blanche’s affectations. Their clash culminates in assault and escalates Blanche’s mental deterioration until she is committed to an asylum.