Cat on a Hot Tin Roof review – Daisy Edgar-Jones and Kingsley Ben-Adir in an intelligent yet passive production

Director Rebecca Frecknall is working her way through Tennessee Williams’s great sagas of misplaced love and wasted lives.  After a devastating Summer and Smoke with Patsy Ferran, and a resonant Streetcar Named Desire, with Ferran, Anjana Vasan and Paul Mescal, she has now turned her simmering intelligence to Cat on A Hot Tin Roof.

Mescal’s Normal People co-star Daisy Edgar-Jones takes on the part of Maggie, the cat of the title, clinging on to her marriage to Kingsley Ben-Adir’s ex-football player Brick, who has been drinking himself to insensibility ever since the death of his best friend Skipper.

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is the latest of the three plays Frecknall has tackled, written in 1955, and the most linguistically heady, making its themes of truth and reality absolutely explicit.  “Mendacity is a system that we live in,” says Brick. “Liquor is one way out, and death’s the other” and Frecknall emphasises the way that lies permeate the action, as a warring family gather to celebrate Big Daddy’s birthday on his 28,000-acre plantation.

Big Daddy is dying, but in Lennie James’s coruscating performance, he is both clutching desperately at life and attempting, finally, to get at the truth of Brick’s self-loathing. He and Maggie are both truth tellers, life-lovers, literally fighting to survive in a world that suffocates them in different ways.

Frecknall makes the action both universal and abstract by setting it on Chloe Lamford’s shimmering embossed set, an anonymous room with darkness and clouds beyond its back wall, an arena where the battling forces gather to fight, drink and suffer. Lee Curran’s lighting turns it silver at one moment, gold at another, filling it with the bright fireworks for Big Daddy’s birthday at exactly the moment he realises he is doomed.

It’s a space full of ghosts, of love unfulfilled and lost. Maggie’s thwarted passion for Brick is parallelled by Big Mama’s for Big Daddy (“I did love you. I even loved your hate and your hardness”) and even by Big Daddy’s for Brick. This poetic sense is emphasised by the fact that the ghost of Skipper – the man Brick refuses to accept he loves – is made visible in the shape of Seb Carrington, who sits at a piano, picking out dissonant chords, loading his own glass with drink, slumping in a corner. A metronome ticks, emphasising the sense of time running out.

It’s all beautifully charted and characteristically thoughtful. The production gives full weight to the horror of the battle for Big Daddy’s estate, making Brick’s brother Gooper (Ukweli Roach) and his grasping wife Mae (Pearl Chanda, fiercely repellent) figures of grasping hypocrisy. Their “no-necked” children are true monsters, filling the room with noise and unrestrained unpleasantness.

Yet the realism of Ben-Adir’s descent into stupor, eyes slowly glazing, hands shaped around his next drink, desperate for the click in his head that will bring him peace, until he ends the play lying on the stage, his face a mask of blankness, creates its own kind of momentum. The production seems almost to wind down, running out of energy before the close.

As Maggie, Edgar-Jones is deliberately shrill and provocative, often crouching on all fours on the piano (an action mimicked by Carrington’s Skipper) or stalking across the floor towards her uninterested husband. Watchful and febrile, sharp-minded and determined, she hasn’t always got the range to cope with Maggie’s long first-act monologues, but as the action progresses she convinces as a woman whose sheer tenacity will see her through. Clare Burt is searing and delicate as Big Mama, brash at the beginning, irritating always, slowly shrinking into sorrow.

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But the moment the production springs most fully to life is in the long central scene between Big Daddy and Brick. Hunched inside a brown suit, clutching his side in pain, James brings extraordinary subtlety and tenderness to a character who is too often a simple bully. He’s constantly alert, questioning, high on his own power and wealth, but genuinely loving, proud of his tolerance. It’s a gripping performance, one where you don’t want to miss a moment and it’s matched by Ben-Adir’s Brick, with his lopsided smile and his consciousness of his own charm, and his utter, desperate self-hatred.

For all its detail and care, the production never again matches the electricity they generate. It’s illuminating, but strangely passive.