“Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” at the Almeida Theatre
Neil Dowden in North London
22 December 2024
Tennessee Williams’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1955 play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof – his own personal favourite – is a classic American dysfunctional family drama set in the mid-century Deep South.
Lennie James and Kingsley Ben-Adir.
Photo credit: Marc Brenner.
Director Rebecca Frecknall – in her fifth Williams production – has used his revised 1974 version for her revival at the Almeida Theatre, which is more explicit in language and content. As before, she has preserved the setting – on a large cotton plantation in the Mississippi Delta – while specifying neither the original period nor a contemporary update. The result is a typically inventive, highly focused show that doesn’t quite penetrate the emotional heart of this dark gothic play.
The rich Pollitt family is in crisis. The patriarch Big Daddy is dying of cancer but thinks he’s in the clear as the others have concealed the truth from him (and Big Mama) as they gather to celebrate his 65th birthday. Meanwhile golden son Brick (once renowned as a football player but now an alcoholic) has fallen apart after the suicide of his close footballing friend Skipper. His crutch for the ankle he has fractured after jumping a hurdle on his old high school running track while drunk signifies his broken spirit. He has frozen out his frustrated wife Maggie, who tries to shake sense into him as his brother Gooper and sister-in-law Mae (whose spoiled children Maggie calls “no-neck monsters”) conspire to take over the estate.
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is an ensemble piece without a single protagonist, as the focus shifts from Maggie to Brick to Big Daddy and Big Mama. It deals with thorny issues of death, greed, sexuality, and love. As Maggie says: “Living with someone you love can be lonelier than living entirely alone, if the one that you love doesn’t love you.” Her feelings for Brick are unrequited because his heart is consumed with grief and guilt for Skipper (who he had himself rejected shortly before his death).
Daisy Edgar-Jones as Maggie.
Photo credit: Marc Brenner.
The play is also shot through with deception, secrets, and self-delusion (probably stemming from the fact that Williams had to live a double life as a gay man). Brick is in denial about his homosexuality and conceals it from his wife and family. They all deceive Big Daddy and Big Mama about his health condition. And Maggie tells a massive lie at the end of the play.
Frecknall is a Williams specialist, with two previous big successes at the Almeida, Summer and Smoke and A Streetcar Named Desire, which both transferred to the West End (with the latter briefly returning there early next year before going on to Off-Broadway). This show doesn’t carry the same conviction despite some interesting ideas. Moving well away from Williams’s original casting of a white plantation family with black servants, here there is an interracial marriage with mixed-race children, which sheds new light on Big Daddy’s rise from overseer to owner and his lording it over his white wife. There is also an onstage pianist throughout who as well as accentuating dramatic moments represents the spirit of Skipper, a pervasive influence on the action.
Frecknall’s stripped-back, semi-expressionist production is striking but really only comes to life when Big Daddy finally comes on stage in the second act as the sparks fly with family confrontations. The long first act between Brick and Maggie is difficult to pull off as Maggie does almost all the talking while Brick is in a monosyllabic drunken depression – and here there is not enough emotional involvement with both characters remaining unsympathetic.
Chloe Lamford’s minimalist design suggests a gilded cage in which the Pollitts are trapped rather than an impressive Southern mansion, with characters sometimes hanging around the edges of the stage as if eavesdropping. Lee Curran’s muted lighting evokes a murky ambience, which ironically explodes into multi-coloured fireworks for the birthday party of Big Daddy who is yet to learn his fate.
In her first major stage role, Daisy Edgar-Jones (who made her name with TV’s Normal People opposite Paul Mescal – who played Stanley in Frecknall’s Streetcar revival) portrays an angry Maggie with more steely determination than sultry sensuality, with her cat-like movements on all fours (including on the piano) more predatory than seductive. Coming into a wealthy family from a poor background, she is going to make sure others don’t take advantage. Her assertive, pragmatic materialism contrasts with the passive, detached confusion of Brick, played by Kingsley Ben-Adir (also better known for screen than stage work, including the title role in the film Bob Marley: One Love). He certainly conveys Brick’s self-destructive tendencies but there is little sense of sexual tension.
Lennie James (who has just starred in the splendid TV adaptation Mr Loverman) may be small of stature but he packs a punch as Big Daddy, a powerful portrayal of a self-made man who is used to exerting his dominance until a stronger force – Death – comes calling. He shows some tenderness as well as anger for his mixed-up favourite son Brick, but is acidly contemptuous of his wife, his other son and his family. Clare Burt’s Big Mama is deeply hurt by her husband’s put-downs but cannot face the fact that he never loved her. Ukweli Roach is the deviously self-seeking Gooper and Pearl Chanda’s Mae bitchily comments on Maggie’s childlessness while nervously laughing off Big Daddy’s insults. And pianist Seb Carrington – while invisible to the others – reacts to what they say and do, the haunting presence of a life cut short through a love denied.
