It is an explosive, groundbreaking play about marriage, sexual identity and life (& death) lies, set in a huge Delta plantation in the American South, with Memphis, Tennessee – the state’s name was adopted by Thomas Lanier Williams for his own –the big city off-stage.
Cat is one of the most difficult of Williams’s plays to perform. The challenges are many, notably for Maggie-the-cat, played brilliantly by Daisy Edgar-Jones, and Big Daddy, a stellar Lennie James in the part.
The opening act is to all intents and purposes an epic monologue by Maggie, with her husband Brick, on a crutch after a drunken injury, listening, or not, and responding, occasionally, monosyllabically, to his estranged wife’s tirade.
The play’s evocative, Faulknerian title announces that this is Maggie’s play, and so it appears throughout the first Act. Maggie, beautiful (and knowing it) but from a poor white southern background (referred to at the time of the play as ‘white trash’) has married up into the richest landowning family in the Delta. Her husband is none other than Brick Pollitt, former sporting hero and the favourite son of the plantation’s larger-than-life owner, Big Daddy.
The plays is set on Big Daddy’s 65th birthday. He and his much-abused wife, an over-sexed (he claims) Big Mama, are the only members of the family who do not know that he is dying. Instead, the two families, Brick and Maggie, and Brick’s brother Gooper and his ever-expanding tribe, are withholding the truth from him: it is his last birthday after all. Who will inherit the plantation is therefore the real issue at stake, but as Brick and Maggie do not have children, it is bound to go to his brother and his family of three+one children.
Maggie is a brilliant social climber, but she needs a baby to get her hands on the estate. She and Brick do not have offspring because Brick will not have sex with her. The reason for this emerges in the course of the play: Maggie, it turns out, slept with Brick’s best friend Skipper, to prove a point, all to do with ‘queerness’, friendship, and sexual polemics. So how will Maggie get Brick to sleep with her? That is her challenge.
There are really just two major speaking parts: Maggie and Big Daddy, with Brick present throughout, playing with his crutch, pouring himself one drink after another, waiting for that ‘click’ in his head that will finally bring a liquor-induce peace. He is played impressively by Kingsley Ben-Adir, who is superb at miming his responses without ever overdoing it.
The production is more squeamish than it needs to be about the text’s 1950s racial slurs and setting: the brilliant, all-black production of the play at the Aldwych in 2009, with James Earl Jones as Big Daddy and Adrian Lester as Brick, did no such thing and was the more authentic for that reason. Nor did it make sense to have Big Daddy use the f-word repeatedly, when there is no raw swearing in the play. Again the austerity of the stage, set against a brick (get it?) wall, never quite worked. On the other hand, the ghostly presence of Skipper, at the piano, on the piano, and lounging in the wings, was inspired. In spite of its painful subject matter, Cat is quite funny, if cruelly so, notably in Maggie’s intense loathing of her sister-in-law Mae’s fertility and her bunch of brash, no-necks children; or in Big Daddy sex jokes, fired up by his delusional new lease of life. But there were few laughs: the production was keen not to offend while the audience seemed equally keen to signal virtue by not laughing. But this play was surely meant to offend, to make us think again about uncomfortable truths? In short, great performances but a somewhat mixed production.
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, by Tennessee Williams
Directed by Rebecca Frecknall
Cast includes: Kingsley Ben-Adir, Guy Burgess, Clare Burt, Seb Carrington, Pearl Chanda, Daisy Edgar-Jones, Derek Hagen, Lennie James and Ukweli Roach.
Running time: three hours (including one interval)
Runs until 1 February 2025
Photo credit: Marc Brenner