Curve, Leicester
8th September, 2021
“Mendacity is a
system that we live in”
The
RTST’s Sir Peter Hall Director
Award champions emerging directors tackling big plays for audiences around the
country. Previous winners include Nancy Medina who directed a masterful
production of August Wilson’s Two Trains Running at Northampton’s Royal & Derngate in 2019. Back in
January of last year, the current recipient Anthony Almeida featured in Curve’s
season preview ahead of this revival of Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955). At the
time, we wrote that he spoke eloquently about his affection of the play’s
emotional setting and how he threw away any assumptions when reading it. Over
18 months later, on a hot September night, we finally got to see his
production. Almeida’s fresh take on the play brilliantly evokes the heat and
intensity of the Deep South setting.
Rosanna
Vize’s design opens with a translucent gauze circling Brick and Maggie’s
bedroom. The white curtain cools the heat of the room and hints at the wider
plantation beyond the gallery doors. Brick and Maggie play much of their opening
scene behind it and on opposite sides of it to each other, evocative of an
emotional barrier between the two. If this offers a degree of protection to the
heat of the Delta, it is soon ripped down in one of Brick’s drunken struggles, revealing
the room, including its harsh red floor, as a confrontational space with
nowhere for the characters to hide. Vize’s design is effective in its
simplicity, and nicely synchronised with Almeida’s direction in that both are
stripped of any fuss.
Williams
plays with space in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.
The private sanctuary of the bedroom becomes a public arena for humiliation and
personal confrontation of unwanted truths. Characters are in a constant
struggle for privacy and breaking that privacy: whether that is Maggie locking
the door only for Big Mama to come in, or Mae, Gooper and their five ‘no neck
monsters’ trying to interrupt. In Almeida’s production, this is blasted open. There
are no walls meaning phone calls from the hallway take place centre stage and
Big Mama stands over Brick from her first entrance. Everything is out in the
open. This is no more apparent than in the scene where Big Daddy confronts
Brick about his alcoholism and relationship with his friend Skipper. Whereas in
the text, the gallery is an offstage place for eavesdropping, here the
intruders are ever-present, watching their private conversation from the sides.
As Big Daddy says, ‘It’s hard to talk in this place’.
It’s
a fascinating play, a crucible of familial tensions and personal demons. It’s
made more interesting by having two versions of Act Three. It’s my first time
seeing the play, but I notice they’ve chosen the original Broadway version,
different to the original version Williams wrote. Almeida has made some other
strong choices. Placing the interval at the height of Act Two allows him to
build the tension again in the lead up and aftermath of Big Daddy’s exit in the
second half. Imagining the final phone conversation between Brick and Skipper
also gives us some more insight into what Skipper meant to Brick. Almeida also
has an eye for detail for the peripheral characters, always watching from the
side-lines. I particularly enjoyed Sam Alexander’s Gooper absent-mindedly
tucking into Big Daddy’s birthday cake, candles still lit, as he stared into
the distance struggling with the fact he’ll always be second best.
There
are moments when Almeida’s direction reminds me of Ivo Van Hove’s treatment of
the ‘classics’, most notably in the moment in Act Three when Big Daddy
struggles, but is ultimately, undoubtedly, triumphant in lifting an upended
table. This is reminiscent of the equally vivid ‘chair scene’, which was
afforded new resonance in Van Hove’s 2014 production of A View from the Bridge. The scene echoes that production not only
in its menacing tension, but is also evocative of Van Hove’s aesthetic focus on
stark physicality off-set by an ethereal sense of purgatorial unease. This
approach suits Williams’ play, where physical, mental and emotional boundaries
are crossed and blurred in a space where there is literally nowhere to hide.
The
production features some fine performances, led by Peter Forbes’ Big Daddy. He
growls at Big Mama to be quiet and roams the stage like an older lion trying to
keep control of his pack. The character provides much of the humour to the play
but it’s often coarse or at the expense of someone else. In a way he feels like
the keystone, all the other characters either fawning over him or playing in an
unwinnable game of one-upmanship for his praise. That is all apart from Brick,
searching for the ‘click’ in his head. Oliver Johnstone gives a physical
performance as the faded football star. He’s often in a world of his own either
hobbling around stage in search for his next drink or bouncing a balloon at the
back of the stage. Rounding off the central performances, Siena Kelly is
magnetic as a breathless Maggie, seductive yet malicious, headstrong yet
desperate. Kelly manages to balance the many facets of the character while
maintaining an odd, yet entirely believable purity of spirit. Kelly is most
definitely a name to look out for.
Almeida
has shown with this production that he has a bright future ahead, and in
updating such a well-known play proves that there are still unplumbed depths in
all the classic plays. In exposing the bare bones of the play, and placing the
relationships at the fore, Almeida has created not only a highly entertaining
piece of theatre, but a tableau of family life that can still resonate with
modern audiences.
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof plays at Leicester’s Curve until 18th
September, before touring to Liverpool Playhouse, Marlowe Theatre Canterbury,
New Wolsey Theatre Ipswich, Theatr Clwyd, and MAST Studios Southampton until 30th
October.
Oliver Johnstone and Siena Kelly in Cat on Hot Tin Roof. Credit: Marc Brenner |
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