A Streetcar Named Desire is the best known play of the mid-20th century and it is also (and not unrelatedly) known in an exceptionally famous version. Marlon Brando’s Stanley Kowalski in Elia Kazan’s 1951 film version, recreating his original stage performance, has never been remotely rivalled and the fact that his Blanche DuBois was Vivien Leigh, Scarlett O’Hara herself, and that Brando seems to have wrested a performance from her by sheer force of histrionic danger greater than anything she had done before is the stuff of a legend so everlasting as to make most stage productions look like footnotes.

So...