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.
It’s not easy to do a play like Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, from one of America’s most famous playwrights, differently. Williams’ plays are a fixture of Western culture; his characters are emblematic of the American South, a place and people caught between the imagined saccharine splendours of the past and the grosser realities of the present. Everybody talks like they're chewing molasses. It’s always a late-summer evening, and tempers are wrought by heat.
But this production is different, with a mostly black cast, and frequent musical references to African-American culture, disrupting our perception of the old-timey plantation owner. The set is modern, feeling a bit like an experimental Ikea exhibition, with beaded curtains signalling doors, a bed in the middle of a rotating platform, a sparse wardrobe and the boozy detritus of Brick’s life. Above, keeping apace with the platform and the ceaseless ticking of an unseen clock, are lights, casting an ochre sunset glow throughout much of the play.
In truth, the lighting does the heavy lifting in creating the setting – though likely only for those already familiar with the play, ready to imagine a dipping sun, dusk creeping in, crickets sounding beyond the veranda. For those that haven’t, the sense of place and time is more likely to come from the (admittedly powerful) performances. Particularly Patrick Robinson, who is exceptional as Big Daddy and a seeming master of the Southern drawl.
It is in them that the power of the play can be felt, and that the production’s creative revisions, including to the script, feel meaningful. Even poignant. (There’s also a lot more comedic relief to be enjoyed here).
In these subtle changes, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof becomes more a play about human frailty as it exists in any time or place. It’s about the lies we tell ourselves, the structures we maintain, and the pain we endure.
“Maybe it’s being alive that makes them lie, and being almost not alive makes me sort of accidentally truthful,” says Brick, in response to his ailing father, whose own persona first hardens and then, upon learning the truth, dramatically weakens.
It is to these themes that the set contributes. The slow rotations accentuate the characters’ sense of dreariness. Of an interminable evening of desultory exchanges, as facades tire and weaken, leaving nothing but the truth that Brick professes to covet. The clock, like the set, keeps turning. Brick, who drinks to deal with the death of his friend and likely lover Skipper, feels ‘intercepted by time’. Time is the shadow that hangs over all the characters, as the undoer of ego, and excavator of truth.
In his preface to Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Tennessee Williams describes his aversion to small talk, and preference to connect through his stories, probing us to look below the surface. In Weise’s production, with a skilled ensemble, emotions are raw. The characters lacerate one another, picking at scabs, disallowing each other’s fictions as their own unravel.
Though the setting is less familiar to us now, and the Southern drawl has mostly vanished from popular culture, the themes of struggling with identity, of relinquishing the past to allow for a new future, and the anger and disquiet therein, are very much relevant. Williams would be happy to know that even 40 years after his death, his stories connect in new ways, their message undimmed by time.
