Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

by Tennessee Williams

seen at the Apollo Theatre on 26 August 2017

Benedict Andrews directs Sienna Miller as Maggie, Jack O'Connell as Brick and Colm Meaney as Big Daddy, with Kerry Fox as Big Mamma (replacing an indisposed Lisa Palfrey), Brian Gleeson as Gooper and Hayley Squires as Mae in this Young Vic revival of the play now transferred to the West End.

The play has been reset in a strangely empty space with vast metallic walls and a raked floor containing a bed, a dressing table and a shower; though it was written in 1955 some of the characters use mobile phones and there is a modern substitute for a record player - it is not clear that all this is an advantage, although the visual effect is striking and underlines the fact that all the characters are in different ways trapped.

The destructive rawness of the relationship between Brick and Maggie is exposed in the first act, in which Maggie speaks almost uninterrupted by her husband, who spends time showering (here, naked and on stage) and then consuming whiskey in an attempt to find the 'click' that enables him to be peaceful in his mind. For both actors, this is tough work - Maggie to talk on and desperately on, Brick to be set on becoming drunk. The simmering violence nearly explodes as Maggie's recriminations eventually goad Brick's anger (masking a terrible loneliness and self-disgust). The two actors manage this prolonged almost-quarrel very well, though perhaps the ultimate in bitterly frustrated passion eludes Sienna Miller.

In the second half, other members of the family make a more substantial appearance and there is in particular a long conversation between Brick and his overbearing patriarchal father 'Big Daddy', whose 65th birthday the whole family is supposed to be celebrating. As a man who thinks he has been released from a threat of terminal cancer, and who can therefore reassert his dominance, Colm Meaney gives a swaggering performance but reveals also an unexpected awareness of his son's problems; but the conventions of the time prevent a real rapprochement, and the lack of absolutely straight talking proves too damaging (though the issue of homosexuality, whether latent or expressed, seems more openly addressed than I remember from the film).

The style of the play is peculiar and hard to sustain - characters often repeat long phrases, perhaps embellishing them the second time round; also, they often name the person they are addressing in every line of dialogue, which does not seem particularly realistic; and the family nicknames threaten to become ludicrously grating - 'Big Daddy', 'Big Momma' 'Sister-woman' (Maggie of Mae, her sister-in-law) or 'Brother-man' (her brother-in-law Gooper - and who, in any case is called 'Gooper' - or 'Brick' for that matter?) The overall effect is baroque and weirdly enveloping, but could in the wrong hands threaten to become wearisome. It is a mark of this talented cast that the production is almost completely compelling, the full revelation of Brick's despair poignant amidst its drink-sozzled anger, Gooper's and Mae's machinations grimly skewered and their naked ambitions both chilling and amusing, and Maggie's final ploy to redeem the situation holding out just the right small chance of hope. The parents, locked in a now - or perhaps always - loveless marriage add their own frustrated angers to this heady mix of dysfunction, compulsive and draining to watch in almost equal measure.