Young talent is bursting from the seams of this latest London revival of A Streetcar Named Desire. The result is a clear-eyed, vital, visceral production — sexy at times, but with a sort of primal danger running through it. What’s most striking is its interpretation of the central confrontation, between Blanche and Stanley; gone is any semblance of a battle of wits, to be replaced by a brutal one-sided assault upon a woman whose fragile mental health has never been more evident.

Fresh from her award-winning success with Cabaret, Rebecca Frecknall returns to the Almeida, where she is associate director and where, in 2018, she directed another Tennessee Williams play, Summer and Smoke. That production featured Patsy Ferran as Alma, another of the playwright’s mentally brittle heroines.

Ferran’s presence now, as Blanche, has a symmetry that is slightly accidental; she joined the production just before it was to open, in December, when Lydia Wilson had to withdraw due to injury. The rescue act makes her heartbreaking, very individual performance even more remarkable.

The production also marks the first London stage performance by rising screen star Paul Mescal. The actor cut his chops on stage in Dublin, before his breakout TV performance in Normal People.

Taking on Stanley Kowalski here is a challenging new spotlight: The fact that he’s barely older than Brando was, when he created the role in 1947, is significant — not just because they share an imposing physicality and beautifully granite features, but because there’s a certain steamrolling aggression that comes from youth that suits Stanley’s instant opposition to his sister-in-law.

Designer Madeleine Girling has stripped the Almeida bare to create a minimal stage in the round; when not performing, the actors occupy the brick-clad surrounds, popping into view now and then with a prop. Most is left to the imagination, other than the many, many bottles of booze detected by Blanche’s alcoholic radar, and the contents of her suitcase — the fine clothes that Stanley finds so offensive, and the papers for the family home that’s now been lost.

At first, the New Orleans residents take the stage together, speaking in a cacophony of chatter that is, itself, drowned out by the loud accompaniment of the drummer perched visibly above them. Bodies bend abstractly, crouching low, animal-like, the overall effect being to suggest the intimidating urban jungle into which the tiny, bird-like outcast from the sticks is about to enter.

With her diminutive figure and skittishness, there’s an immediate sense of fragility and vulnerability about Ferran’s Blanche. In fact, she seems seconds from breakdown the minute she arrives. Unlike other Blanches, when she speaks of nerves it does not seem like affectation, but genuine distress, years of guilt, ostracism and over-dependence on men having taken their toll; her drinking, flirtation (notably with Dwayne Walcott’s engaging Mitch) and flights of fantasy are all acts of desperation.

This doesn’t mean that Ferran loses Blanche’s snobbery and misguided disdain towards her sister’s husband and friends; her description of Stanley as an ape (which he inconveniently overhears) is brilliantly dispatched. In fact, Ferran enthusiastically gobbles up Williams’ lines, capturing the wit of the wobbly flirt perfectly, accompanied by a dry, bitter self-knowledge, as when she observes, “I’ve got to be good and keep my hands off children.” She seems to know that she’s hanging on by a thread.

Mescal has a strangely impassive face: His starting position for characters often appears to be a sort of emotional reticence, and a watchfulness that, briefly, offers the wrong impression about Stanley. His first encounter with Blanche is understated, even polite; but when he decides his wife is being fleeced (fueled by a comic obsession with the Napoleonic Code), the real man emerges — a ticking time bomb who frequently rushes into violence, whether roaring at the top of his voice, slapping his pregnant wife, attacking his friends or, ultimately, raping his sister-in-law.

As he prowls around the edges of the stage, waiting to jump onto it for another confrontation, he is very much an animal — not Blanche’s ape, but a jungle cat, circling its prey.

Now and then Mescal puts the character back into his cage, allowing the occasional smile, or displaying Stanley’s genuine, highly sexual attraction to his wife. Indeed, the only times this man wilts are when he realizes he may have overstepped with Stella, the brute giving way to a callow, rather pathetic young man. Nevertheless, his destruction of Blanche is deliberate, cruel and shocking.

Anjana Vasan is also excellent as Stella, conveying her character’s self-assurance, which allows her to forgive or confront her man on a case-by-case basis. While it’s easy to see Stella as caught in the middle of her sister and husband, a mediator, Vasan offers a reminder that she’s much more than that: a survivor, marching to her own tune. The moving despair Vasan displays when Blanche is finally taken away by doctors powerfully reflects Stella’s realization of her complicity in her sister’s fate.

Some of Frecknall’s directorial touches are unnecessary: the sudden slow-motion in a key scene, which simply delays its emotional impact, and a couple of downpours (a relatively recent theatrical tick that is becoming sorely overused). But the use of song and music add to the revival’s distinctive mood, which is alternately poignant and oppressive. Her key achievement is the boldness of removing that illusion of equality in the central dynamic, leaving a harsh, saddening portrait of abuse.

Venue: Almeida Theatre, London
Cast: Paul Mescal, Patsy Ferran, Anjana Vasan, Eduardo Ackerman, Ralph Davis, Janet Etuk, Gabriela Garcia, Tom Penn, Jabez Sykes, Dwane Walcott,
Playwright: Tennessee Williams
Director: Rebecca Frecknall
Set designer: Madeleine Girling
Costume designer: Merle Hensel
Lighting designer: Lee Curran
Music: Angus MacRae
Sound designer: Peter Rice
Presented by The Almeida Theatre, by special arrangement with the University of the South, Sewanaee, Tennessee