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Mickey Jo
So Tennessee Williams plays, by and large, will contain three A man who is gay but will marry a dramatic woman regardless. A woman who is concerned about nothing else, like the inheritance of property and whiskey. Just so much liquor. Oh my God. Hey. Welcome back. My name is Mickey Jo and I am obsessed with all things theatre. I am a professional theatre critic here on social media and I recently went to the Almeida Theatre to go and see Kat on a Hot Tin Roof, which they are currently producing there. And it's at this exact moment that I have realized I am not holding the program. Where did I put the program? Aha. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, the latest of the Tennessee Williams plays to be programmed at the Almeida Theatre in Islington, directed by Rebecca Frecknell, previously at the venue. She has also directed Summer and Smoke, which transferred to the Duke of York's Theatre in the West End, as well as more recently A Streetcar Named Desire, which initially transferred to the Phoenix Theatre in the West End and is actually coming back to London ahead of an international transfer. It's heading over to New York. But that is not what we are talking about today. We are going to be talking about Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Is it as thrilling a production? Is it as likely see a West End transfer and subsequent success? Is it as strong a play? We will be answering all of these questions. How are the leading performances by Kingsley Ben Adir and Daisy Edgar Jones? Now, if you have been lucky enough to snag tickets to this very sold out run and you've already seen it, let me know. Let us all know what you thought in the comments section down below. Did you enjoy this production? These performances, the creative choices? If you've seen a previous production of Cat and Hot Tin Roof to which you can compare it, let us know about that as well. And if you've seen this play before elsewhere, feel free to tell me about that experience. I'm very curious. For now though, here are my thoughts and if you enjoy this review, make sure to subscribe or follow me for more theatrical coverage coming very soon. In the meantime, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof we have three acts unfolding over one evening. It is Big Daddy's birthday party which they are celebrating in the family home which is on this 28,000 acre estate. I say estate, the word I'm looking for is plantation. We're in Mississippi. It's the mid-50s. Big Daddy is the family patriarch. He is married to Big Mama. Sure, they have two sons, each of them marries. The eldest has three children and another one on the way the youngest, named Brick, has no children with his wife Maggie. It's predominantly with this couple that we spend the first act. Brick is in his room, having not joined the family at dinner because, as we very quickly find out, he has a broken leg or a foot or an angle. Something in the lower, like sub knee. He has broken something below knee. This injury, it is revealed, took place in the early hours of the previous or that morning when he went to an old track and tried to jump hurdles and relive his former glory as a sports star. But he was drunk and so he fell down and he broke things. And now he's very frustrated about that. And he's still drinking for a whole host of reasons, one of which is his wife Maggie, who arrives irritated from dinner where her lovely dress has had a biscuit thrown at it. That's not. Not an English biscuit. A biscuit in the Americas is like. It's like a bready. Like a. Like a roll, like a cakey. Sort of a. Sort of it. Someone will comment in the comment section down below. It's not a digestive. That's what I'm trying to tell you here. I feel like you could take a digestive to the chest and you wouldn't necessarily need to go and immediately change. Like the consequences would be less a jammy dodger. That depends. That depends on the nature of the impact. Also, it probably hurt more. Those are hard. And the first act is this dialogue between the two of them that she largely drives. He, for the most part, responds lifelessly or ignores her entirely or gaslights her into thinking that he hasn't been paying attention, which only makes her more irritated. She continues talking the entire time, complaining, complaining about her brother and sister in law and their children. All the while he is drinking to simply try and know peace. He articulates repeatedly throughout the play that there is a level of inebriated that he reaches where it ticks over in his mind and he suddenly feels peaceful. And that today, for some baffling reason that escapes him, it seems to require more alcohol. She is deeply concerned about the behavior of the brother and sister in law because she sees through their act and she knows that they are trying to appeal to Big Daddy and Big Mama because Big Daddy has yet to write a will. And it is the belief of Maggie that he is dying of cancer at the beginning of the second act. Then everyone comes upstairs to Brick's room where they continue the celebrations. Only the environment soon becomes hostile because Big Daddy has realized that he doesn't need to cede his power. And he gets the sense of his family encircling him like vultures, waiting for his demise, almost plotting for his demise. This rubs him entirely the wrong way. And he decides what he wants more than anything else in that moment is to have a private conversation with his younger and preferred son, Brick, in which the two of them struggle to articulate themselves emotionally. Brick is not really trying to say anything. Brick is just trying to drink as much as he can as quickly as possible. Only I should tell you, he also has one of his feet in a cast and he is using a crutch to get around. So there is this struggle. And in the first act, Maggie takes the crutch away from him. He also throws throws it at her at one point as a weapon. Big Daddy takes the crutch at one point. All of which is an indicator of the power dynamics shifting between these characters. And the play has an awful lot to say about the balance of power between generations, but also the balance of power in each of the three marriages that we see in this family, between the men and their wives, all very interestingly played. Of all three wives, Maggie feels the most determined, the most self assured, the most driven on several fronts. But she knows that her husband is keeping something from her. She knows that there is a truth behind it all that they aren't really talking about, that she tries to broach as a subject in the first act that ends up coming slightly to light in his conversation in the second act with his father. And that's what this play is. This is a play about revelation, unlike something like A Streetcar Named Desire, which I think is probably my slightly preferred Tennessee Williams, just because that is a play of action and things happen in this. And you know, we have, we have plenty of family arguments around the birthday party. It's one of those people are drinking, tensions are rising, the Southern drawls are popping the hell off. But it's less of a play where things happen and more of a play in which characters announce things which already have. I'll tell you a little bit about the third act, and this is going to go into spoiler territory, which I do think it's important to talk about in this review. But if you haven't seen it yet, if you don't want to know, skip ahead to the next part. We have this family meeting. Come back together. People have been kind of overhearing the very contentious conversation between Brick and his father. They want to get everyone together to reveal to Big Mama before they tell Big Daddy that they have been Lying to her about his positive test results. He is in fact dying of cancer and he will before too long be an extraordinary pain and it's inoperable. And she thinks because of the way that she is being told this information, that this is an attempted family coup. And it doesn't help that Brick's older brother has a document prepared that would entitle him to control of the, I keep trying to say estate. And it's not plantations. Slaves happened the plantation. And it would afford him financial dominance over Brick, who at this point is an irresponsible drunk. And it's at this point it kind of turns into succession. But a huge component of this whole thing is the backstory with Brick and Maggie, who met when they were much younger and when he had a young male friend named Skipper. People had names like this back in the day. You'll be shocked to learn that there may have been a homosexual attraction between them, at least a one sided one. That much seems to be confirmed because Brick suggests to his father, who is surprisingly cool with the whole thing, apparently because when he was overseer on the plantation, it was run by a gay couple or by gay men at least. Brick tells his father that his friend Skipper called him to reveal his affections, which Brick spurned, which he said he didn't reciprocate. Whether or not he did is sort of remains to be seen. But the fact that Skipper's subsequent suicide drove Brick into such an enduring shameful depression seems to suggest that maybe he wasn't being entirely truthful. What he doesn't tell his father is what was discussed in the first act. That Maggie had become aware of this at least aware of Skipper's affection for Brick, and she had confronted Skipper about it and Skipper had had a sexual encounter with her in order to try and prove that it wasn't true. But Maggie understood then and tells Brick that they had slept together out of their mutual love for Brick and their determination to prove their love for him. Which is admittedly just like a slightly unusual way to go about it. Like buy the man a dr, get him some flowers, buy him a card. Anyway, that is the synopsis of Cat in a Hot Tin Roof. I think in terms of the play itself, it's a little longer than it needs to be, particularly that first act. I don't think the dynamics between the two of them shift enough to justify the length of this confrontation between them. Or at least they don't in this production. She repeats herself, Maggie, that is so many times as she's talking about the no neck monsters. And she's a cat. She's a cat in a hot tin roof. She's like. It's like she's a cat. A cat who's on a hot tin roof. She's a cat in a hot tin roof. And she tells us this at least five times in. In the first act alone. And then Brick talks about it to his father. He brings it up in the second act. He's like, cat on a hot tin roof. And his dad's like, oh, that's good. Cat on a hot tin roof. Like, they love this metaphor. Brick hears Maggie say it in the first act, and even though he's resenting her in this moment and drinking his sorrows away and trying not to look her in the eye, he's thinking, damn, that's a good line. I'm going to use that later. Brick. Cat in the heart. Tin roof. No neck. Monstrous. No neck monstrous. Cat in the hot tin roof. Brick. It gets a little grating, but what we eventually get to. Very rewarding, very exciting. And there's so much potency to the idea of Big Daddy being so invoked before we finally see him. It doesn't sound good coming out of my accent, does it, Big Daddy? We also have the seeds sown by her of Big Daddy's ailing health before Big Mama suggests that he's fine. And we then find out that he's not before she does. There's a lot of power in that as well. Now, let me tell you about this production by Rebecca Frecknell. So, like I said, Rebecca Frightnell has done many different Tennessee Williams productions before. What I think is her greatest strength, or one of her greatest strengths, I should say, as a director, is these really blistering, intense and fiery exchanges between two performers on stage. She also directed the ongoing revival of the musical Cabaret, which is currently running in the West End and on Broadway. And some of my favorite scenes from that production are the ones where it's. It's a similar kind of exchange between two characters loaded with tension and unspoken truths and duplicity. She does really fantastic work. What's interesting about this production is it contains another one of her recurring themes. So back in Summer and Smoke, the whole stage was encircled by a semicircle of upright pianos, which were utilized throughout the play. And this idea of music on the breeze in the south gave it this sort of a haunting, ghost like quality that's very important. Remember that subsequently in A Streetcar Named Desire, it was a drum kit. This was set back behind and above the action. Punctuating all of its tension. And in this production, a single solitary grand piano is one of the only set pieces in this very ornate but also empty box of a playing space, the design of which feels appropriately decadent given the setting that they describe, but lacks. Many of the furnishings which are mentioned. They talk about sofas, but we don't see sofas. We see very plain black chairs moved around. The only thing that we do really see is this piano upon which is a metronome, which commences at the start of the play and continues to tick throughout until it doesn't. Now, what I find super interesting is this contrast between several upright pianos and a single grand piano and what that says about this world comparatively, that we're living in for this play. And I think it's to do with the extreme wealth and what a fact that is and how desperate everyone is as a result of that, to inherit this plantation. That's kind of the elephant in the room. And similarly, the use of this piano music on occasion throughout the piece gives it that same kind of a haunting quality. It's equally conspicuous when we hear silence when the pianist is away from the piano, which also has huge meaning that I will tell you about in just a moment. But as much as anything else, what's interesting is the set piece, which isn't there, because in so many other productions of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, the bed is there, and it's this conspicuous thing because they're not using it. They're not using it for its intended marital purpose. Are all of them coming to the bedroom shared by Maggie and Brick because he can't leave, because he has this cast on his leg, so he can't come downstairs. So they're bringing the birthday party to him. But everyone is having conversations about their lack of children and their lack and her not being pregnant and them not having had children and them not doing the thing that would allow them to have children. And usually that is the elephant in the room, because they're having this conversation with their marital bed right there. And it's not in this production. Instead, it's the grand piano. But people frequently climb up on top of the grand piano as though they are climbing onto a bed. But also with their physicality, the way that they do it, they look like cats on a hot tin roof. A metaphor which I should explain here. This is talking about an animal finding itself in a painful predicament and one that it can either choose to leap off of or stay in. And this is Maggie using this allegory, talking about her very strained marriage to Brick. She's not happy, he's not happy. The two of them aren't really having a successful marriage. They haven't had children together, even though she has privately gone to find out that she can, in fact. But the lack of intimacy between them has meant that, you know, they haven't. Thus far, this slightly emotionally tortured existence is the hot tin roof that she refers to. And she is the cat. Now, I mentioned the metronome. We hear this ticking throughout the thing, which conveys inherently a sort of a background sense of unease, ease. But it also, it makes the silences as we see a lack of emotional connection between really many of these characters. Like even Big Mama comes in warm towards her son, wondering why he rejects her affections. She is spurned by her husband. Big Daddy can't connect to Brick in the way that he wants to. God knows that Brick and Maggie can't connect to each other. So when we hear these silences, when we hear the gaps where their kindnesses should be, the ticking makes it more conspicuous. But it's not just that there is reference to a clock on the wall, and that is the ticking that we are hearing. And finally, finally, I mentioned to you about this level of drunkenness that Brick says he is able to reach, where his brain just sort of shifts into a different gear and he can know peace. It's at this point in the plot, when he finds this, that the ticking finally stops, which I think was a staggeringly exciting directing choice. Now, before I move on, I do want to address casting in this production and talk about why that's a bit of an interesting component here. Because at this time, historically, you wouldn't have seen a black family, which is how the family are depicted here and how it's been deliberately cast in ownership of this 28,000 acre plantation. They're like, they keep. They call it the biggest plantation in the Mississippi Delta. What it does is infuse the thing with something of a sense of this attained wealth and this thing that they now have and this reluctance to lose it. And the importance of the plantation, the meaning of that sort of finds an added depth. And also because the men of the family are cast with black performers and the women who have married into this family are each cast with white actresses, casts a very strong divide between the two in the sense of family and the outsiders who have married into it and the fact that they are all women as well, it's fascinating. It contributes, I think, to this slightly us versus them power dynamic that we see in the play, as two out of three of these men express doubt, doubt that their wives had ever loved them throughout their marriages. Here's something else I love. I've told you, this is a three act play. At the start of the second and third act, they recap the last line said in the previous one and then do the transition into the next moment. Not because the action picks up immediately from where we left off, in fact it doesn't. But just to get us back into that sense of tension. I think it works very well, as does. My God. I need to tell you about the lighting designer. The lighting. When they had have fireworks. Lee Curran was the lighting designer. And we see these huge flashes of yellow and these huge booming sound effects of what we hear at that moment. And it's explosive and it's impactful and it feels like these damning gunshots as the whole stage is lighting up with more color and vibrancy than we have seen throughout the production, which is quite harsh and intensely lit and exposing. It feels as much as anything else like they're in a police interrogation room that happens to have nice warp. And I think that's an interesting choice for this play. It makes it feel very intense, very forensic. There is probably a warmth that you could find in it in a more naturalistic production against which all of the coldness of certain exchanges and certain revelations would feel a little more conspicuous. Something that Big Mama as a character would be more at home in. That would allow Brick's emotional state and Maggie's and Big Daddy's to sort of stand out more. But that's not the vibe of many previous Rebecca Frecknell Tennessee Williams Productions. I do wonder if her style lends itself a little less brilliantly to this than some of the previous ones, because it's. It's about the relationships and that's really what she brings out of the material. But it's also about this past life for Brick. And I would like to see a little more of it. If there was a way in which, as he spoke about it, his words could conjure and invoke the memory of that, we see it teased a little bit because, and this is a big spoiler here, if you don't want to know about this specifically in this production or the plot details that I told you to skip past previously, you can skip past this as well. But when everyone arrives for the party, when they bring the party upstairs to Brick's room and all the extended family appear and we see Big Daddy, who makes a grand entrance, the pianist who has been sat at the piano, who started the metronome, who is, you know, causing this unease in Brick's mind because he is the one who set off the metronome. He is the one punctuating the arguments with chords on the piano. He stands up and he goes and slumps down in a corner as everyone else arrives. And I thought to myself, oh, my God, he's Skipper. And he is the way that he is directed, the way that he stays on stage when everyone else leaves and he hears. He witnesses the conversation between Big Daddy and Brick. As Brick finds the strength to tell his father about the true nature of his friendship with Skipper, which his father had already suspected. He goes back to the piano. He climbs on top of the piano. He holds Brick. At one point, he is clearly Skipper. He is the ghost of Skipper playing the piano. I thought that was a brilliant choice and I thought it could even have been used a little more, a little more creatively. But with a production such as this, with such an open framing, it really becomes all about the characterizations and the performances. And so that is what we are going to discuss next. Now, Daisy Edgar Jones truly dominates the first act of this as Maggie. So we'll talk about her. To begin with, I better understood her characterization in the context of the entire family. The biggest rivalry that comes to light here is that between her and her sister in law. The two of them are both entirely aware of the other's machinations. They see right through each other and they know that it's all about inheriting the plantation. That is all that each of them really cares about. And as Maggie is more openly feuding with her and trying to appeal to Big Mama at a time of emotional crisis, then we can see what Daisy Edgar Jones is doing with this character, which feels quite juvenile. She feels a little more emotionally immature. She doesn't feel quite as worldly as some of the dialogue in the first act would suggest. That she is but glimpsed through that lens of youth and perhaps foolishness. A lot of the spite with which she delivers those early lines makes a lot more sense. The emotional war between her and Brick that is in some ways passionate and in others completely passionless is very skillfully played by the two of them is entirely believable. I just found her performance initially, I think, lacking in a certain amount of depth. And for that to be the entirety of the first act. So driven by her, it began to feel a little unrelenting. It just felt like a couples therapy session that was in no way productive. Kingsley Ben Adir as Brick, meanwhile, is the slowest of slow burns because he really takes time to reveal anything with any kind of honesty. We can see a certain amount of like, lightly simmering rage and resentment. At the beginning, there are a couple of hurtful admissions towards Maggie, a couple of moments of aggression and frustration. But for the most part, he is stoic and resolute and just slowly drinking himself into a stupor. And it's so interesting, the physicality and the way that he is able to move around the space because he is limited. It's such a fascinating dramatic tool to have the crutch be the thing that can help him get across the room, the literal crutch. And then you have the alcohol he's drinking, which is the emotional crutch. And the fact that he weaponizes that, the fact he throws it at her, the fact that she throws it away from him, his father takes it away from him, him. It's all. It's so interesting in terms of how a director can use that to get him stuck in these locations, to pin him down and as Tennessee Williams is, and forcing these conversations, forcing these moments of tortured emotional admission. And Kingsley, first of all, plays drunk spectacularly well in a way that is gradual throughout the play, in a way that increases, but with that, as he is using it to fend off off reality and fend off painful memories as he is forced to unearth them, they are, in their way, sobering. And so we can see the effect that that has on him as well. And when he does explode, it's with his father in the second act and those outbursts that are violent, but are emotional and sorrowful. And he has this disdain for himself and for the world and for everyone else in the room. It's a really fantastic choice. And the way that his shame has manifested and the way that his despair has manifested into this indifference, really, it's brilliantly calculated, I think, in terms of his characterization. I think it's a fantastic performance. Expertly physicalized, expertly delivered. He's remarkable. Ukwele Roach does great work as Gooper, Brick's older brother, who is a little one note as a character. But when he eventually loses his patience with. With his mother in the third act and just lets the mask drop entirely, that's very well played. Pearl Shanda plays May, his wife, a really winning supporting performance. And again, this is another mask being dropped slowly throughout the play because she's trying so hard to act the right way and say all the right things and be the perfect daughter in law. To Big Daddy, who evidently has no patience for her whatsoever. He catches her eavesdropping at some point in the second act. And the way that she tries to hide this and then becomes terrified by his reaction. So brilliantly played. And then the small moment of altercation that we see between her and her husband and then her still trying to manipulate the situation in the third act. Seb Carrington does great physical work as the pianist, really great work. And Lenny James plays Big Daddy. And you know what? It's another slow burn because he doesn't enter in a way that feels declarative in its authority. But he soon enough makes his power over the family very clear as he demands how the rest of the evening is going to unfold. And he has this long talk with his son. And what emerges the most in that and in his performance is this very difficult love that he has for his son. He is ashamed of him and he is, you know, he has this tremendous concern for his alcoholism as he comes to realize the extent of it, as he is trying to force a confession from his son about what it is that necessitates his drinking. But through all of that, he still cares for him far more deeply than he does for his other son. And there's a selfishness to him as well. And it's possible on some level that he doesn't trust the medical information that he's been given, even though he is celebrating that and he is celebrating his positive diagnosis, because you can see this frustration and there's possibly a fear behind that, as well as this very layered and complex depiction of a man brought to anger and brought to this brutal honesty and this rage around the duplicity that he perceives among his family. Mendacity is the word that they use, he and his son, when talking about the lies that have taken place. Finally, Claire Burt plays the family matriarch, Big Mama, in a wonderful performance. I already loved her in the first act, in the brief moment that she has arriving and then just trying to speak to her son. Son and extending a certain amount of maternal patience towards Maggie that expires pretty quickly. We see this extraordinary conviviality and warmth from her as the party moves upstairs in the second act, we see her doting over her grandchildren. We hear about conspiracy between her and May, her other daughter in law. And then we see her shock and despair when she has this reprisal from Big Daddy, whose dreadful behavior towards her she later tries to apologize for and to excuse before she encounters this dreadful, life altering revelation from her son. And we're venturing once again into spoiler alert territory here. But her performance of this grief and this instant despair and horror and it's shock really. She is playing that first moment of discovery and the shock of it all and this extraordinary denial as she refuses to begin to make any plans about what might happen, about the concept of him having a will, about the future of of the home and the plantation and her place in it. She is so rooted in the now that she refuses to glimpse the future and she refuses to believe this terrible news that has been brought to her. But as we hear her voice cracking through it, as we can see the tears bubbling in her eyes, we see this extraordinary love for this man who has been treating her in a demonstrably terrible way throughout the evening, throughout the previous two acts of this play. And yet there is so much pathos as he goes angrily to go and be alone on the roof and she calmly asks if she can go with him and the two of them depart the stage together. Like Brick and Maggie. They have this very strained relationship and there may be little love left in it, it may be one sided at this point, but they remain by each other's sides regardless. One of the many fascinating aspects of a really rich piece of theatre. I enjoyed this very much. I don't think it's a perfect production of Cat and a Hot Tin Roof, nor do I think Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is my favorite Tennessee Williams play. But there's an awful lot to like about it and particularly if you've seen a production of this before. I think the creative choices. Rebecca Fergnan is always a director who I love to watch for an interpretation. She will always have a perspective on a piece. It's not just like another one done in the traditional way. There will always be novelty to it. There will always be a freshness to it. And that's what I felt in Counter Hock Tin Roof at the Almeida. Kudos to you if you already have a ticket to go and see this. I don't know if I'm necessarily expecting this to transfer into the West End like A Streetcar Named Desire, but I think if it does, that will have more to do with cast availability and theater availability. In the meantime, if this sounds like something you would be interested in, do feel free to try and get a return ticket. On the day that I went to see it, it was a Thursday matinee. There were other tickets available online that morning that hadn't been available the night before, so do look into it. You can still get tickets if you're really, really desperate. But in the meantime, perhaps you've been able to enjoy it a little vicariously through this review. I hope that you have enjoyed. Stay tuned for more theatrical coverage. More reviews coming very soon, and I hope that everyone is staying safe and that you have a stagey day. For 10 more seconds, I'm Mickey Jo Theater. Oh, my God. Hey, thanks for watching. Have a stagey day. Subscribe.