THERE were some strong performances by women this year, most notably Gillian Anderson’s award-winning interpretation of Blanche DuBois in Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire.
This Blanche is Scarlett O’Hara on her uppers, an ineffably sad vision of fluttering hands, spent desire and haunting madness.
Who knew that Anderson could pull this off when other great actresses have floundered in the role — the spectacular miscasting of Glenn Close in a previous production springs to mind. Anderson’s fragile Blanche evokes Vivien Leigh’s unforgettable performance but she makes it her own.
Despite the rave reviews, Kirsten Scott Thomas in Sophocles’s Electra at the Old Vic did not convince.
The tragedy at the heart of this complex character is difficult to portray — Electra struggles with what she perceives to be her moral obligation to avenge her dead father as she plots to kill her mother while her appeal for forgiveness reveals levels of great conflict.
The play explores the agonising moral and social consequences of vengeance yet there’s no empathy with Scott Thomas, whose performance is more ranting banshee than tragic Greek heroine.
The overall structure and pacing throughout did little to help her portrayal, with director Ian Rickson failing to get the balance right.
Medea by Euripides depicts another woman hell-bent on revenge and in the title role at the National Theatre Helen McCrory was outstanding.
Medea kills her children to punish the spineless and treacherous Jason, whom she has helped to victory. She’s a force of bitter destructiveness but McCrory’s performance elicits our sympathy and identification with a woman brought to the edge of madness by rejection, loneliness and fear.

Yvonne Lysandrou