This is director Rebecca Frecknall’s third Tennessee Williams for the Almeida after Olivier-winning Summer and Smoke and A Streetcar Named Desire, soon to be briefly back in the West End before opening on Broadway. The last featured Paul Mescal, star ofTV’s Normal People; his TV co-star Daisy Edgar-Jones here plays Maggie, self-described as “a cat on a hot tin roof”.
As with those other productions, Frecknall gives it an abstract setting; designer Chloe Lamford covers walls and ceiling with shiny metal tiles, empty spaces where doors and windows might be; at the rear, instead of opening up to southern sunshine, we see the battered, bare brick of the Almeida’s back wall.
Williams sets his first scene in a bedroom, but instead of a bed, there is a grand piano on which are decanters, glasses and a metronome which a pianist, entering in the half light, sets ticking, starting the play with a feeling of tension. Is this a reminder that our days are numbered, especially those of Big Daddy in this play, or is it the tick of a time bomb? The pianist (Seb Carrington) will morph into the ghost of Skipper, the fellow footballer friend whose suicide seems to have turned protagonist Brick alcoholic. The piano will rise to crescendos to match the emotional outbursts that will keep exploding, sometimes drowning out the dialogue.
Almost immediately, Daisy Edgar-Jones as Maggie, the cat of the title, is into one of those outbursts. It is a long one that she sustains without respite for almost the whole of the first act, prowling like a tiger on the piano top, berating silent husband Brick, who no longer sleeps with her. Here is the desperation of a poor girl who has married money and fears the expected inheritance from his dying father, Big Daddy, will all go to Brick’s brother if they don’t have children.
Maggie has reason to think Skipper was gay. Is Brick mourning the loss of a lover or drowning in guilt because he rejected him? In a family of liars, who knows? What they do all know, except for Big Daddy and Big Mama, is that Big Daddy has terminal cancer. The doctors have told the patient he just has a spastic colon, and today, pretending all is well, the family celebrate his birthday.
Brick hobbles around on a crutch: he has broken his ankle jumping hurdles in the dark trying to repeat youthful feats. Kingsley Ben-Adir makes him largely impassive, trying to block out his wife’s diatribe, but the pain is there and there is a beautifully graduated increase in drunkenness as the play progresses, and he shows great sensitivity in a central scene when his father tries to prise the truth out of him.
Lennie James doesn’t have the bulk of Burl Ives (the first Big Daddy), but he gives a weighty performance of the self-made rich man who owns a huge plantation (his achievement made even stronger in this production as a southern black man who took over from white owners). He may be a bully and his attitude to his wife cruel, but he is honest and James finds sensitivity too and even vulnerability.
Big Daddy says he stopped loving Big Mama, and Clare Burt’s performance suggests why but delivers genuine emotions. Brick’s brother Gooper (Ukwell Roach) seems pretty straightforward, but his wife Mae is a schemer, Pearl Chanda’s Mae makes very clear as she directs her monster kids in a prepared piece to butter up Big Daddy.
This is not a nice family, but amidst all the shouting, something comes through of why they are like this. Brick still has charm and his good looks and hopelessness as he waits for the “click” when alcohol will bring him oblivion may gain sympathy, but this is a production that makes the audience observers rather than drawing them in.
Reviewer: Howard Loxton