She was an excellent Yelena because her ambition and unvanquished aura of health have found a match playing a woman who cannot die but is aggrieved to live. One worried for her as Hedda Gabler and again as Blanche DuBois in “Streetcar Named Desire” (all Sydney Theatre Company productions, where Blanchett is co-director with her husband, playwright Andrew Upton) because she struggled so to fit her neat large bones in characters bodies that repelled Blanchett’s hard work, and optimism. Yelena is dissatisfied, but she has an intellegence that works outside herself, which neither Hedda nor Blanche can do. When Blanchett made her curtain call, I was touched to notice that as she ran offstage, and then returned, her body had found its proper stage
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