FringeReview UK 2024

Cat On a Hot Tin Roof

Almeida Theatre

Genre: American Theater, classical, Drama, LGBT Theatre, Live Music, Mainstream Theatre, Theatre

Venue: Almeida Theatre

Festival: FringeReview UK

Low Down

Review

Rarely have bodies so overtaken their characters. In this visceral, lacerating Cat On a Hot Tin Roof opening at the Almeida directed by Rebecca Frecknall till February 1^st it’s as if Maggie’s and Brick’s bodies form words. Paradoxically, far more humanity emerges for them and for Big Daddy than any production I’ve seen.

It’s not only Frecknall’s 2018 Summer and Smoke with its six pianos that makes so many Almeida productions speak quality when even a single grand is centre-stage: which is quite often. Seb Carrington  haunts throughout as pianist and dead Skipper, possible lover of Brick and certain one-night-stand with Maggie, riffs Angus MacRae’s composition: pure echt-Messiaen chords gesturing to another world. Carolyn Downing’s sound brings shrieks as well as detonates (most spectacular with fireworks, lit by Lee Curran), otherwise this is the sound in Chloe Lamford’s stripped open-back set, boxed in with metallic Huit-Clos walls: a white-hot tin mirror in crazed lozenges where not even heat escapes.

Brick (Kinglsey Ben-Adir) is not only lame with a busted ankle, he’s permanently drunk: truth is disinhibited, his one threat of violence to Maggie slurred out as if he doesn’t mean it. It’s an extraordinary performance just because Ben-Adir plays not only subtext but almost sub-vocally. The integrity of underplaying and slurring every instinct to yowl a drink-articulated pain is suppressed in favour of simmering around his crashed-out, or crutch-driven circlings around the sun that is Maggie.

Maggie (Daisy Edgar-Jones) blisters and stalks her way across the piano with Carrington and around Brick, slinking on and off costumes by Moi Tran, one silvery and metallic too. Her highpoint comes early: not quite an act-long monologue, since it’s artfully interrupted by children, her rival Mae (married to Brick’s elder brother Gooper) and Brick himself. But Edgar-Jones inhabits the play’s title and shows how key the phrase is: prowling along the piano towards Brick, ready to throw herself off the roof. Edgar-Jones makes us believe too that despite offers, Maggie’s as fixated on Brick as he is on dead Skipper, and on repelling her. Maggie literally impales herself on self-knowledge. She reflects Brick was formerly such a good lover because he was indifferent.

Yet “Life has got to continue even after the dream of life is over,” she reflects: their failure to produce children means favoured younger son Brick might be passed over by avaricious, spiteful but understandably aggrieved Mae (Pearl Chanda). There’s depth of feeling and double-talk, but this Mae’s humanised, as is smooth politic lawyer Gooper (Ukweli Roach): who would have liked to love his father who patently doesn’t love him.

The moment is past, and Roach projects like Chanda moments of welcome cool, even chilliness into their smooth, as children (Mimi Eytle, Ebony Francis-Peddie and Asa Jones on this occasion) amplify the feelings their parents don’t articulate: weaponised as well as welcoming Big Daddy with saccharine insincerity.

If Roach’s Gooper is oleaginous, then Reverend Tooker (Guy Burgess) is the syrup that doesn’t pour, as Gertrude Stein once put it. It’s difficult to freeze syrup, but Burgess manages it in a horrible magenta suit Tran picks out as an eyesore. Derek Hagan’s Doctor Baugh shrinks elegantly back against the wall as far as he can, to avoid the drama, and manages to make Burgess look a picture of warmth.

The heart of this production, apart from Maggie’s unanswered questions and coup in th third act, is the drawn-out encounter between Ben-Adir’s often prone Brick and his father, Big Daddy (Lennie James). Though ostensibly diagnosed with a “spastic colon” – a line that brings laughter as a comic catch-phrase – he’s not been told he’s dying.

Of four versions Williams made of his 1955 play, Frecknall has gone for the 1974 revisions: a limited amount of swearing underscores Big Daddy’s outburst The poetry and half-repeats of litanic phrases are punctuated in their rise and fall.

Not yet has Big Mama (Clare Burt) whose containment and gloopy sentimentality – and desperation – show how she prefigures Maggie: sexually desirous according to her husband, as he confides in Brick, he obliged till five years ago (she’s now 63, Big Daddy 65), but long disgust has finally caught up. The parallels with Maggie could hardly be greater, but Big Daddy isn’t burdened with “mendacity” as Brick explains himself, and Maggie appreciates his appreciation of her. Big Mama though like her husband loves Brick more than anyone. The dynamics really are Greek.

The way James teases out that “mendacity” from Ben-Adir are deeply moving. No longer the monster (that’s reserved for the “no-neck-monster” children) the whole act rises in an aria of baffled affirmation as Big Daddy emerges from the shadow of death to name new desires: whereas everyone but he and his wife know he’s been lied to. James and Burt display in abundance the couples’ one terrible wrong: love of Brick, disdain for Gooper. But elsewhere they’re humanised and no more so than in James’ tender probings as Big Daddy, admixed with tough love on the rocks to make Brick speak. And that, as Ben-Adir underscores, is an achievement.

Scaled very much within the physical confines of their bodies, fretted with family dynamics, the epic power emerges as of itself. Intimacy and detail become universal. Frecknall has re-thought and refreshed one of the great, and classically-framed American dramas. And made it classic.

Casting Director Julia Horan CDG, Children’s Casting Director Amy Beadel CDG, Costume Supervisor Cait Canavan, Dialect Coach Michaela Kennan, Fight Director Sam Lyon-Behan, Associate Director Justina Kehinde

Published December 20, 2024December 20, 2024 by Simon Jenner