Most stereotypes of the American South have their genesis in a Tennessee Williams’ play. Blanche DuBois, from Streetcar Named Desire, is the quintessential debutante, hopelessly relying on the kindness of strangers, whose overwrought naivety has served as a template for many characters since. Meanwhile, in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, there’s Big Daddy.
Big Daddy is the white-suited, cane-wielding, rotund patriarch of a Mississippi family, owner of the biggest cotton plantation ‘this side of the Delta’. It’s his birthday, and he’s just been given a clean bill of health. Or so he thinks. Apt to his name, the other characters of the play spin around his orbit. His undoing precipitates theirs, as delusions dissolve in the Mississippi heat. Facades shatter, and truth – unremitting, unrelenting – escapes through the cracks.
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof opened in 1955, and earned Williams the Pulitzer Prize. A new run of the play, directed by Roy Alexander Weise, is now showing at the Royal Exchange in Manchester until April 29th.
