Reader Reviews
What's in the Cat? (Royal Court - Jerwood Theatre, West End)
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 | The fact that Linda Brogan wrote this play out of her own experiences makes it obvious why the passion is so raw and it also makes it very genuine and unaffected. The dialogue is shocking and crude and at so points very funny. The characters are fully fleshed out, flaws and all, and this provides the audience with real resonance as loyalties keep changing. The performance took place in space two in the contact theatre. It was intimate with quite a small space for the audience and an open stage with no proscenium arch. Audience and stage merged into each other, which made the performance very intense. The set was three rooms of a house, the kitchen and living room and the ground floor and another room above those. There was one wall separating the kitchen and living room which had a door in it. There was a Christmas tree which went through both levels of the house through the floor in the middle which linked the two storeys and became a focal point in the play. The furniture in the living room was cramped around the TV, which made it awkward for characters to move around without getting in the way of it. This heightened the tension between the family members. The decoration, apart from the tree, was minimal, which made the house look very drab and sombre. All three rooms were visible at the same time so you never lost track of a character unless they left the house. This made it more realistic and the audience could watch the changing states of the characters at all times. The household was the foundation of the performance and is what held it together and made it coherent. A play containing so much anguish obviously demanded a lot of integrity from the actors. Mary Jo Randle stood out the most for me Margaret, because of her amazing stamina and subtle change of condition as she got more and more drunk. The more intoxicated she got, the more she revealed of her vicious, yet wounded character. She unravelled from a busy mum cooking Christmas dinner and looking after her pregnant daughter to a dishevelled mess, drunk out of her mind, screaming obscenities at her neighbours and trying to cut her wrists. She has one moment of tenderness in the play where she and Lauren, played by Rachel Brogan, are playing with each others hair. This one moment of tenderness in a play full of angst is very touching and it is heartbreaking when it is cut short by a vicious outburst from Margaret. - 130.88.185.112) | 12 Dec 05 |
