Amanda Drew has been longing to play tragic southern belle Blanche DuBois since she was a drama student, she tells Laura Davis

PERHAPS it is because she has just stepped out of rehearsals and has not quite shaken off the vestiges of her character but there is palpably something of Blanche DuBois about the Playhouse’s latest leading lady.

There is a nervous energy behind Amanda Drew’s ardent endorsements of Tennessee Williams’s writing, accompanied by a flash of her blue eyes that resolutely hold your gaze.

And you sense resilience beneath a veneer of fragility when she confesses to her own insecurities, or it is the other way around?

Characters do have a way of rubbing off on her, Drew admits, whether she’s playing the tragic southern belle of Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire, or the baby-snatching Dr May Wright in EastEnders.

“I can certainly identify with Blanche’s sense of insecurity about herself, her own identity, and how fragile that has become because of society and family pressures and her emotional traumas,” she says.

“As an actor I’ve got to try and identify with all the core elements of the character I’m playing and really amplify all the sensations, mirror things that I can find in myself.”

There’s a danger that a character’s darkness can overwhelm you if you don’t take care to prevent it, she adds, pausing to half-apologise if that sounds self-indulgent.

“As an actor you are trying to be as if you are that person on stage so you have to inhabit them fully,” says the 42-year-old.

“If you’re saying lines that are very powerful every single night they resonate on you and your psyche so therefore at the end of the night you have to make sure you have a little ritual or something to snap you out of it.

“The character I played in EastEnders had a great arc that ended in a very tragic downfall, but you don’t have to repeat that performance night after night after night on a long run. It doesn’t embed itself in your psyche in the same way.”

It is thanks to the contradictions in Blanche’s character that A Streetcar Named Desire has become one of the most performed pieces of American theatre. She was famously played by Vivien Leigh in the 1951 film, starring Marlon Brando as her brother-in-law Stanley Kowalski, whose violent personality clashes end in rape.

Both prudish and promiscuous, longing for someone to love yet self-interested, Blanche fascinates and repels.

“It’s probably about the best role for an actress,” says Drew.