Cat on a Hot Tin Roof Sienna Miller Review
This is a classic case of director's theatre. It has iii estimable stars in Sienna Miller, Jack O'Connell and Colm Meaney, but all the talk is likely to be of what the director, Benedict Andrews, has done with Tennessee Williams's play. Every bit nosotros know from Andrews's work at the Young Vic, which is presenting this show in the W Finish, he is a major strength and some of his ideas are illuminating, but I still experience this is a play that should belong to its performers.
Andrews and his Swiss designer, Magda Willi, take taken some radical decisions. They banish breathtaking realism, so in that location is no hint that we are in a vast Mississippi delta mansion ("Victorian with a touch of the far eastward," says Williams of Brick's bedroom): instead they seize on the constant reference to cages to present usa with a gilded-plated prison. It is dominated past a bed and a shower, extensively used by a naked O'Connell as if to cleanse himself of his deep-rooted guilt. The action is updated to the present, with frequent use of mobile phones. This strikes me as questionable since, in the era of same-sex activity marriage, you lot feel the characters would exist less shy about discussing Brick's ambivalent human relationship with his expressionless friend, Skipper.
The best feature of Andrews's production is that it combines emotional intensity with a leavening humour. You feel the tension betwixt Brick, a star athlete who has retreated into alcoholism, and his wife, Maggie, who yearns for the sexual pleasure they once enjoyed. As the characters kick at a birthday cake or hurl water ice cubes about the stage, we also get a sense of the desperation surrounding the inheritance of the dying Big Daddy's estate. Andrews appreciates that Williams was a comic writer. Large Daddy'southward grandchildren – from Brick'southward blood brother, Gooper, and his wife, Mae – are rightly seen equally gaudily overdressed monsters strategically deployed past their parents.
Of the three chief performers, still, the only real revelation comes from O'Connell'due south Brick. He has the obsessiveness of the true alcoholic, his attention rigidly fixed on the 4 whiskey bottles prominently placed downstage. He also suggests the inwardness of a homo locked into his own private earth and however tormented past his denial of Skipper's love and his own furtive wish to reciprocate it.
With Maggie, the bar is set high after stunning performances by Lindsay Duncan in the 1988 National Theatre revival and Sanaa Lathan in Debbie Allen's all-black 2009 production. Miller gives a perfectly creditable performance and makes expert use of her trunk: shedding her nobility, at one point she crawls towards Brick on all fours, with her posterior arched in the manner of a cat on heat. Her vocalism, all the same, doesn't quite accept the color and range for Maggie'due south demanding first-human activity litany of grievance. Meanwhile, Meaney conspicuously understands, intellectually, Big Daddy'south combination of rednecked Mississippi vulgarity and fear of encroaching death. All he lacks is the instinctive physical power that James Earl Jones brought to the part.
There is practiced support from Lisa Palfrey as a minidressed Big Mama, riding with the verbal punches, and from Hayley Squires as the eagerly acquisitive Mae, and newcomers to the play will go a sense of its stature. But, while Williams'due south written report of the conflict between truth and illusion may be timeless, it works best when rooted in the detailed realism of the American South in the 1950s.
- Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is at the Apollo theatre, London, until 7 October. Box office: 0330-333 4809.
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2017/jul/25/cat-on-a-hot-tin-roof-review-sienna-miller-jack-oconnell-benedict-andrews-tennessee-williams
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