Patsy Ferran on pairing up with Paul Mescal in Streetcar: ‘The nerves just skyrocketed’
I nudge the recording device a bit closer to Patsy Ferran as we chat under the bright lights of the National Theatre foyer. The Olivier award-winning actor is an electric presence on stage – a performer you cannot bear to stop watching – but she is surprisingly softly spoken in person. We are here to talk about her star turn as Blanche DuBois in Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire – a role that Ferran sheepishly admits she never imagined playing.
“I saw Blanche as uber-feminine, conventionally attractive, overly sexual and light,” Ferran says. “Very light. I think I have those qualities in my own way, but they’re much more leftfield.”
The truth is that even Ferran’s long-term collaborator, director , did not initially envision her in the role. But after the actor Lydia Wilson suffered an injury late on in the a few years earlier and seem to find something special and new when they work on his writing together.
