It is fascinating, Rebecca Frecknall’s fascination with Tennessee Williams. Over the past six years she has systematically unpicked the plays, making audiences at the Almeida reconsider an established dramatist. In 2018, she directed a revelatory, stripped-back interpretation of the little-known Summer and Smoke. Five years later she took the stage by storm with her production of A Streetcar Named Desire, fired up by the dynamic casting of Patsy Ferran and Paul Mescal. In tackling Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Frecknall has cast Daisy Edgar-Jones, Mescal’s co-star in TV’s Normal People, as Maggie, the candid and frustrated woman who styles herself “the cat”, and infused the evening with her customary mixture of drama and dream.
“Mendacity” is the word that rings through the evening. But it would be lying to say fibs alone are Williams’s subject. True, the plot is a web of concealment – and where better to explore this than the theatre, which is make-believe. An elderly man is not told he is dying from cancer; his son cannot admit to his love for another man; wives hide from themselves the knowledge of their husbands’ contempt. Still the drama’s particular force comes from exploring the impulses behind the lies.
