A Streetcar Named Desire, Scottish Ballet, Sadler's Wells

Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire carries with it an enormous loading from its past, the associations with those iconic performers on stage and screen Marlon Brando and Vivien Leigh not the least of them. For a narrative dance, that hothouse close-up combat between the hapless Blanche Dubois and Stanley Kowalski, her sister’s boorish husband, needed a fresh revising and some bravely independent performing. Much kudos to Scottish Ballet for creating and pulling off a genuinely involving new dance-drama which looks as stylish as it feels emotionally substantiated.

Director Nancy Meckler, artistic director of theatre company Shared Experience, and choreographer Annabelle Lopez Ochoa made a successful conversion of the words into movement material by taking the useful observation that there is no past tense in dance. They show us Blanche Dubois's full story, not just as the fraying belle with her befuddled memories in New Orleans, but also as the girl whose life led her there. Shades of the ballet Giselle, we see the destruction of a blameless girl’s equilibrium by her betrayal by her beloved new husband, her discovery that he is homosexual, his suicide, and her guilty self-obliteration in drink and promiscuity.

The strength of it is less on the complexity of the characters and more on the success of the evocations of places, impressions of time, the conditions for events, rather than their motivation. The flow is much clearer and stronger than in Liam Scarlett's clotted Sweet Violets at the Royal Ballet earlier this month. Story elements are illuminated in flashes on a stage decked sparely but evocatively with furnishings.

A single lightbulb, or a grid of them, a pile of crates - such simple elements have inventive results in the hands of designer Niki Turner, with the economical lighting work of Tim Mitchell. The wall of the genteel monochrome world of Blanche’s marriage (pictured left) collapses, the blocks are swiftly manipulated by dancers into a streetcar, its tracks, wheels, relentless mechanics, and then the crammed interior in which Blanche recoils from the crush of other flesh.

That scene is also a pleasing sample of Ochoa’s observant, resonant choreography and inventiveness with props. Rather in the manner of Matthew Bourne, she whisks body-language and contemporary dance together, with Blanche on pointe, to show the socially pretentious widow ill-at-ease in the earthier New Orleans company of her sister Stella. Ochoa also slyly nuances her ensembles  when they engage with Blanche: just how much should we deduce from their body language - menace, discomfiture or just indifference?