At first sight, Cate Blanchett’s Blanche DuBois is ghost-like: a spotlit, deathly pale figure who sits in silent reflection. It’s an unsettling moment of quiet for a character who literally vibrates with nervous energy for most of Tennessee Williams’s drama A Streetcar Named Desire and a rare glimpse of Blanche without any posturing. It foreshadows what’s to follow: By play’s end, Blanche is a vestige of her former self, completely destroyed by her obsession with the social mores that imprison her.

Blanche DuBois provides a focus and energy that command attention and propel other characters forward. When she arrives at the New Orleans apartment of her sister Stella and brother-in-law Stanley Kowalski, Blanche stands bolt upright, rigidly tense, clutching frantically to the last vestiges of gentility she’s wrapped herself in. Her immaculate linen suit is in sharp contrast to the weathered shabbiness of the Kowalski home. Torn magazine pages adorn the walls, bare lightbulbs glare overhead, trains rattle in the distance. Blanche pours herself a drink with shaking hands and surveys the scene with distaste, much to the chagrin of Stanley (Joel Edgerton), a seething mix of powerful masculinity and animal magnetism, who resents this intrusion into his home. It seems inevitable the two will clash—and they do, repeatedly, with increasing brutality.

Cate Blanchett’s stellar performance is the star attraction, but it’s also the play’s core. Other characters take second place to Blanchett, although Edgerton is also compelling. His incessant, mocking laugh—“heh heh heh”—taunts Blanche brutally, while his mighty physical presence both attracts and repels her. Robin McLeavy’s Stella is bland, short-sighted, and submissive, conceding to either Blanche or Stanley to avoid conflict.

At times, the Southern accents from the Australian cast—this is a Sydney Theatre Company production—can be a little rough around the edges. But the production has been put together with such heart that they’re easy to forgive. The set, a two-story concrete monolith with only the bottom half (Stanley and Stella’s apartment) revealed to the audience, contributes to the sensation of entrapment, and the lighting by Nick Schlieper is superb. It also has a special symbolism within the play: Only under a rose-tinted Chinese lantern is Blanche able to relax.

Director Liv Ullmann—the Norwegian actress famous for her work with Ingmar Bergman—pulls no punches in revealing Blanche’s disintegration, but she also hesitates to assign blame: Blanche, after all, sneaks liquor habitually and lashes out at her “bestial” brother-in-law while simultaneously being drawn to him. In the second act, Blanche sits genteelly at afternoon tea, wearing a dress more suited for cotillion than the French Quarter, refusing to lose her grip on her fantasy. Later, almost completely drunk and aware that her past has been revealed to her suitor Mitch—played in an understated way by Tim Richard—she recalls the events that precipitated her decline and then wraps herself like a child in furs and jewels, symbols of a kinder age.

It’s hard to say which is more painful to watch—the cruelty Blanche suffers at the hands of others or the way she propels herself toward her inescapable fate.