Cat of a Hot Tin Roof @ Almeida Theatre...

Last Friday night Stuart and I went to see Cat of a Hot Tin Roof @ Almeida Theatre in London's glitzy Islington.

 

Directed by Rebecca Frecknall, we have Daisy Edgar-Jones truly phenomenal as Maggie, the complicated female lead of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

 

The first act of Tennessee Williams’s 1955 classic is more or less a monologue for Maggie, interspersed by grunts from her booze-addled husband Brick (Kingsley Ben-Adir).

 

Edgar-Jones is so good inhabiting Maggie with a burning, vivacious swagger, alternatively self-mocking, self-pitying, compassionate and vicious in her diatribe to Kingsley Ben-Adir’s Brick about the wretched state of their marriage.

 

Unlike Edgar-Smith, Ben-Adir spends much of the play horizontal and virtually catatonic. Brick was always uncommunicative, but Ben-Adir takes it to a new level; terrific acting, sacrificing showing off for the greater good of the play. Brick is trapped by his guilt over close friend Skipper’s death and the claims about the nature of their intimate friendship.

 

Using Williams’s own potty-mouthed 1974 revision of the play, there are copious f-bombs as Brick's take-no-shit, Trumpian Big Daddy enters the fray. Humourless and unfeeling, he instinctively treats everyone around him like crap – everyone apart from Brick. Ben-Adir plays the character so crushed and pathetic that it’s hard not to see Big Daddy’s obvious love of him as somewhat redemptive – there is an honesty to Brick’s total collapse that you sense the older man on some level admires. Meanwhile his contempt for Brick's much more competent brother Gooper is simply very funny.

 

The production reaches its doomy apex as Brick finally unburdens himself of his guilt to his father, and his father rages back, under Lee Curran’s remarkable lighting – apocalyptic washes of primary colours that represent birthday fireworks but look like a war. A family at war.

 

A dysfunctional family full of cracked characters. These are not normal people.

 

A fabulous production.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️