Abstract
At the beginning of Scene 3 in Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire, a rich
description of Stanley Kowalski’s poker night invokes a painting by Van Gogh. The
reference draws attention to the brash colours Williams harnesses as part of the imagery
supporting Stanley’s brutal directness. Clearly Williams finds no better analogy for the lurid
scene of the poker night than the painting, on which he relies to set the scene for the reader of
the script: “There is a picture of Van Gogh’s of a billiard-parlour at night. The kitchen now
suggests that sort of lurid nocturnal brilliance, the raw colours of childhood’s spectrum”
(Williams 24, original italics).