Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
Although Tennessee Williams’ great play of sexual and domestic mendacity is clearly set among rednecks in the Deep South in the 1950s, Debbie Allen’s revival from Broadway is an almost wholly successful transplant to the 1980s as an all-black Dynasty of the Delta plantation.
Led by the legendary James Earl Jones – surely London’s last chance to see this great figure of the American theatre – as a rumbling, terrifying Big Daddy, Allen’s cast is a compelling synthesis of visiting and local talent.
Her sister Phylicia Rashad repeats her New York performance as a slightly hysterical, spiritually lonely Big Mama, and the stunning Broadway newcomer Sanaa Lathan makes an impressive, vindictive aria of Maggie’s first act torrent of sexual frustration and feline provocation.
Maggie’s marriage to Brick, the former sports star and dedicated alcoholic, is a tragic parody of an ideal pairing: Adrian Lester’s graceful, leonine Brick is ferociously insistent on the purity of his friendship with his dead friend Skipper; he almost dances round the set on his crutch, finally aiming it at Maggie like a heat-seeking missile.
There is something garish and brutal about Morgan Large’s design which places the marital bed upstage centre and denies us consolatory glimpses of scenic vistas or whirring fans. It’s the crude material kingdom of Big Daddy for which Brick, the anointed son, is challenged by his brother Gooper, the corporation lawyer, and his wife Mae with their brood of fat little no-necks.
Allen casts the RSC actor Peter de Jersey as a full-throttle, febrile Gooper in loud red socks, while the beautiful Nina Sosanya is a brilliantly unusual Mae: a vengeful reproach to Maggie in her boastful, figure-retaining fertility.
Allen has no qualms, with David Holmes’ lighting and Richard Brooker’s sound, in poeticising key moments – Brick’s memories of football glory, Big Mama’s big speech – and the return of Big Daddy allows us to see a man glorious liberated from the cancer diagnosis into savage outbursts of cruelty facing the truth at last with a newly conciliatory dignity.
The play’s a shocking rollercoaster, still, and this revival, not without its bumpy moments, renews its full shock value, with nice cameos from Joseph Mydell as the doctor and Derek Griffiths as a tame, subservient priest whose nerves are shredded at every turn in the bickering.
