Goddess of carnage: Pamela Rabe atop that coffee table during an altercation with Geoff Morrell.

Marlon Brando memorably finished a performance in the original 1947 Broadway production of A Streetcar Named Desire with blood smearing Stanley Kowalski’s soon-to-be-iconic T-shirt. He’d been boxing backstage to keep up his energy, and his sparring partner had landed a blow on his nose. His cue came just as he was trying to stem the bleeding, and he managed to get through his scene with Jessica Tandy (playing Blanche DuBois) before fainting from loss of blood and being rushed to hospital.

The Enthusiast can’t help recalling this episode in theatre history upon hearing the news that Cate Blanchett also bled onstage while playing Blanche DuBois in the current Sydney Theatre Company production of the very same play. During a fight scene, her co-star Joel Edgerton (playing Stanley Kowalski) was meant to throw a heavy old-fashioned radio out a window, but somehow it found Blanchett instead, striking her a glancing blow on the head with a clunk that could be heard from the audience.

Eyewitnesses didn’t immediately realise this wasn’t part of the staging, as Blanchett continued to act for the next minute or so before realising she wasn’t up to climbing a staircase. The scale of the drama only became clear when the house lights came up, a voiceover ordered Edgerton to leave the stage and the audience was herded out of the theatre and told the show was over.

Happily, Blanchett received medical treatment on site and was back on stage the following evening, thanks to the kindness of strangers. But she has prompted us to revisit some of the more recent injuries that actors incur as a result of especially methodic acting – or when staging goes horribly wrong.

Actor: Pamela Rabe
Method injury: Put foot through coffee table

There are actorly antics down in Melbourne right now, too. Veteran Australian stage star Pamela Rabe was lucky to escape without serious injury last week when, during a performance of God Of Carnage for the Melbourne Theatre Company, she kicked a hole in the large coffee table that’s a centrepiece of the French satire’s set. Since then, reports The Sunday Age’s ‘Snitch’ column, Rabe’s broken shoe has been repaired and the table has been patched up. Observant theatregoers will notice Rabe’s co-star Hugo Weaving place a mobile phone carefully over the damaged spot.

Actor: Fred Kellerman
Method injury: Shot in head during execution scene

There’s something vaguely Waiting For Guffman-esque about the one-in-a-million lucky break that left community theatre player Fred Kellerman with only minor injuries. Rehearsing his final scene as Lennie Small in Of Mice And Men, the Florida retiree had a real .32 Smith & Wesson revolver pressed to the back of his head – but the cast member who owned the gun and had brought it in for added realism hadn’t thought to check whether it was loaded. Oh boy, they got added realism all right.

Astonishingly, the point-blank shot ricocheted off Kellerman’s head and took a piece out of his ear. Bleeding profusely but realising he wasn’t dead, Kellerman went apeshit at the gunman – the play’s director Bill Bordy. “He was really, really upset about it, so I quieted him down a bit,” a sanguine Bordy told the Sarasota Herald-Tribune.

Actor: Adrian Bailey
Method injury: Fell 6m through trapdoor

Bailey, an ensemble cast member in the Broadway stage production of The Little Mermaid, was singing ‘Under The Anaesthesia’ rather than ‘Under The Sea’ in May 2008 when, minutes before a matinee performance, he fell 20 feet (six metres) to the stage. Bailey was participating in one of the musical’s early scenes, in which a boat is lowered into view.

Actors’ Equity had already been in negotiations with the producers’ Broadway League regarding workplace health and safety – especially on productions with complex staging. Bailey suffered two broken wrists, a broken foot, broken back, broken pelvis and broken ribs. Later he required surgery for five herniated vertebral discs, and ended up suing Disney, plus the production’s set designers and builders.

Actor: Adam Salter
Method injury: Leg trapped in hydraulic stage machinery

Holy crap, this stage-spectacular stuff is really Dickensian now we start to look into it. Just a month ago, Walt Disney World performer Mark Priest actually died after slipping and banging his head on a wall. And in May 2007, Adam Salter was playing a Ranger in the London mega-production of Lord Of The Rings (the most expensive musical in West End history) when his leg became trapped in the hydraulic machinery driving the elaborate set.

As Salter screamed, “My leg, my leg!” hobbits rushed to his aid and the curtain flopped down. He was taken to hospital and – we hope – has recovered; his Twitter profile says he’s currently working on Walking With Dinosaurs. His injury was a sign of things to come for the production, which was savaged by pun-happy critics (”Flawed Of The Rings”, said The Sun) and closed after a year’s run – a poor effort by West End standards.

"Streetcar!" BD Wong's jazz hands gave way to pain. Image: Joan Marcus

Actor: Warrington Gillette
Method injury: Hand slashed with axe by slasher-movie fan

It’s hard out there for a pimp… or for an actor whose most notable role was the hockey-masked Jason Voorhees in the 1981 film Friday The 13th Part 2. So we imagine Warrington Gillette takes all the fan-convention work he can get. However, he may be more cautious in future, after an incident in February this year at a New York club party honouring the franchise.

Gillette had been hired to re-enact the role of Jason, and he appeared onstage in full costume in a cloud of smoke-machine smoke, wielding a real axe. However he was apparently a little too scary; a female fan leapt onto the stage and tried to grab the axe off him. Gillette managed to wrest it from the Final Girl’s grasp, but in an ironic turn the slasher turned slashee – Gillette incurred deep gashes to his hand.

“Lingerie-clad models were running and screaming, as a blood-soaked Jason ran off the runway to get to a hospital,” reported the New York Post. Yep. It’s hard out there for a pimp.

Actor: Daniel Hoevels
Method injury: Slashed own throat with knife during suicide scene

Austrian actor Daniel Hoevels is one lucky dude. In December 2008, the star of Friedrich Schiller’s play Mary Stuart was meant to simulate suicide on stage by slashing across his throat with a specially blunted prop knife. However, the knife was somehow swapped with a sharp one and Hoevels fell to the stage, gushing blood.

The audience actually applauded, believing this to be an especially realistic special effect, but realised their mistake when Hoevels stumbled offstage. “If the actor had put a little more pressure on the knife or even struck an artery, he would probably have bled to death on the stage,” a doctor who treated him told the newspaper Oesterreich.

Police were investigating whether the knife was deliberately switched. Hoevels, amazingly, was back onstage the next night, his throat bandaged.

Actor: BD Wong
Method injury: Gored self in thigh on piano bench

BD Wong, the urbane actor beloved of Law & Order: SVU fans, certainly made a ‘Wong’ move during a 2007 Boston performance of the one-man musical Herringbone. During a dancing sequence, Wong somehow gored himself in the thigh on (presumably, the corner of) a piano bench. He limped offstage but returned five minutes later, out of costume.

“Hello, I wanted to come out and show you that I’m standing up,” he told the audience. “But I did cut myself very badly. I need stitches, I think.” (Is it uncool of us at this point to be reminded of Mustafa, Dr Evil’s “very badly burned” henchman from Austin Powers?) Wong went on to compare the bloodied bench to an SVU prop. The next night, like so many of his fellow wounded thesps, he returned to complete the show’s run – what a trouper!