Strangely and sadly, Trevor Nunn opens his farewell season at the National with one of the greatest miscalculations of his long and distinguished career. Something in his alliance with Glenn Close, at the time of Sunset Boulevard a decade or so ago, seems to have persuaded them both that she would also be right for Blanche DuBois in Tennessee Williams's greatest play, A Streetcar Named Desire.
But Blanche is not Norma Desmond, nor does she need to be played, as here, in a tradition rather closer to Joan Crawford in her B-movie phase. Blanche is a damaged butterfly, not a vulture on speed, yet from her first appearance on Bunny Christie's vast set (apparently constructed for some opera-house revival of Porgy and Bess, where even the tenements of 1947 New Orleans have been built to resemble Manhattan skyscrapers), Glenn Close gives the impression that she has come to take over the area.
Nunn throws a great deal of National cash and everything he's got at this production, which aches either to be a musical or one of Williams's later follies such as Camino Real, full of weird extras drifting about selling flowers for the dead or going into jazz riffs. But the more he tries to disguise his original casting mistake, the worse it gets. To understand Williams's character, look at Vivien Leigh, mercifully still on video in the original movie; remember Sheila Gish, or, in America, Jessica Lange who has been playing Blanche these past 20 years or so.
Blanche is an accident waiting to happen: sensuous, borderline crazy, destroyed by her past and unable to face her future, and finally sent to a madhouse by a brother-in-law's rape. Close - controlled, controlling and about as vulnerable as a Sherman tank - comes nowhere near.
Essie Davis, as her long-suffering sister Stella, seems to have more idea of how to play Blanche; Iain Glen, the British actor who stands around politely while an American movie star gets her kit off (remember him in The Blue Room?), is a kind of Home Counties Stanley Kowalski, no more misconceived than anything else in this misbegotten production of what was once an intense, intimate, poetic drama of the dispossessed.
The first lady of the Broadway musical is also the last of the Broadway babes, and for the next six weeks she is playing five solo shows a week at the Old Vic; if you miss them, you will never truly understand the greatness of the American theatre in the 20th century.
Elaine Stritch is now 77. She started out in the New York theatre more than half a century ago, suitably enough as the understudy for Ethel Merman, the only other American woman who could truly claim to have been the heart and soul and larynx of her nation's greatest art form.
The Stritch solo is not a concert, cabaret or a celebration, though it is built firmly around Noel Coward and Stephen Sondheim, the two master songwriters who wrote specifically for her and always understood her very special talent. Unusually here, the star bleeds through every number, but not in a quest for sympathy. She tells us early in the evening that she has been a lifelong, if reformed, alcoholic; that she is diabetic; that she lost the only man she ever loved, her only husband; that she lost a fortune messing around with a script of The Golden Girls; and that she lost the love of Ben Gazzara by chasing after Rock Hudson.
Her writer John Lahr and her director George C Wolfe have realised that Stritch, an existential problem in tights and a white shirt who is joined on a bare stage by one single chair and nothing else (unless you count a full orchestra in the pit), is also a walking, talking, dancing time bomb.
Unlike any other Broadway star singer, she has performed in the plays of Edward Albee and Tennessee Williams, who also recognised that this iron butterfly could break your heart while wringing your neck. In a 60-year career, she has remained true to her own bleak philosophy - if it isn't raining now it almost certainly will be by the time you go out.
Nobody understands the emotional wasteland that lies at the heart of a lyric by Sondheim or Coward better: her talent to amuse is laced with vodka, and at a time when stars are bought and sold overnight, Stritch is a reminder of what endurance means. She stands there and is the history of Broadway: you can't ask for a lot more than that, but then she sings and dances and tells you her life story and you are on your feet because she has been on hers all night, and there has never been a moment when she has been anything less than brilliant and focused and dramatic and alive.
If you don't believe me, go see for yourself; she sure as hell won't be coming to see you. Not now the cocktail bars are closed to her and all around the showbiz night is getting darker.
A Streetcar Named Desire is at the Lyttelton, National Theatre, London SE1 (020 7452 3000) until 23 November; Elaine Stritch at Liberty is at the Old Vic, London SE1 (020 7928 7616) until 23 November
