Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

Following its sell-out run on Broadway, Tennessee Williams’ Pulitzer Prize winning modern classic Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is on at the Novello Theatre. Directed by award-winning Debbie Allen and performed by an all-black cast including big names like James Earl Jones, Phylicia Rashad, Adrian Lester and Sanaa Lathan, this production has turned out to be a box-office hit in the West End too. On the night I saw the play, the theatre was dominated by a black audience, a rare and much needed reversal in a predominantly white middle-class West End – and the cast received a standing ovation. Leaving the excited audience behind, I was left to question whether this reverse-race production was as critically coherent as it was a commercial success.

The story unfolds amid a wealthy family in the American Deep South, William’s native and impassioned locale. Over a gathering at the family estate on a Mississippi plantation, the Pollitt household celebrates the 60th birthday of the patriarch Big Daddy (Jones). He is not informed that he is dying of cancer. The family members conceal this fact from both him and his somewhat downtrodden wife Big Mama (Rashad), and scheme to receive the definitive share of the tycoon’s enormous wealth.

Family lies unfurl in the bar-equipped high-sealing bedroom of a young couple: a crippled former football hero Brick (Lester) and Maggie (Lathan), the sexy but frustrated ‘cat’ who has escaped poverty by marriage and is hell-bent on maintaining financial security. In a gripping monologue, Maggie seethes with rage at Brick’s indifference to her and harpoons his brother’s attempts to gain control of the family fortune.

Taking centre stage in the scond act is an explosive father and (favourite) son confrontation. Jones works wonders in bringing the wealthy, brutish, hoodwinked plantation owner to life; towering with pride and jubilant in the belief that his newly discovered cancer is in remission, cracks start to appear as the reasons behind Brick’s alcholism and allusions to his homosexuality come to the fore. Lester is in control of his performance throughout, harbouring a dark, brooding psychology, disillusioned by the suicide of his close male friend Skipper. When ‘the powerful and obnoxious odor of mendacity’ in the room is hightened in the final act, all the ‘mendancities’ face the family, and Big Daddy more than the rest.

Had the reverse-race casting been an overt political affront on Allen’s part to the white-dominant setting and overall tenor of the play, then its desired outcomes would have been questionable at best. The cast did little to break new interpretive ground or meaning, but did everything to bring out the drama of the family situtaion.