THEATRE REVIEW:
CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF
28 MAY/11

JOHN COULBOURN,
QMI Agency
Rating: 5 out of 5

NIAGARA-ON-THE-LAKE — Despite the success of a little work titled A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE, the Shaw Festival is claiming the best known work of playwright Tennessee Williams is his Pulitzer Prize-winning play, CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF. And, judging by the opening-night response Thursday, when the curtain fell on a new production of CAT in the Royal George Theatre, they might just have the show to back it up.


The production, of course, marks the centenary of Williams’ birth — and the coincidental passing of Elizabeth Taylor, who with Paul Newman conspired to etch the CAT on the public consciousness in the acclaimed 1958 film adaptation, which has become its gold standard. It is thanks to Taylor and Newman, in fact, that the first challenge faced by director Eda Holmes and her team (just like every other director and crew who has tackled it since the movie) is a complex exorcism that allows them to reclaim the story from those more celebrated players, and render it a clean slate on which a new production can be drawn.


It is a fresh slate indeed that Holmes gives us, with a Brick and Maggie so removed from Taylor and Newman that, initially, it almost seems like she’s trying to force round pegs into square holes. As Brick, Gray Powell forsakes Newman’s brooding intensity for deceptive detachment that, at least initially, puts one in mind of post-traumatic shock, while as Maggie The Cat — his sexually frustrated and increasingly desperate wife — Moya O’Connell eschews everything even vaguely kittenish and plays Williams’ celebrated heroine instead more like a wounded and increasingly voracious leopard.


The play is set entirely in a bedroom in Brick’s childhood home on a plantation in the American South — a place to which he has retreated after the death of a beloved friend, to crawl into a bottle and leave Maggie, his interfering wife, far behind. And even the birthday of the patriarch, Big Daddy (a magnificent Jim Mezon), can’t draw Brick out. So while the rest of the family celebrates, Maggie competes for her husband’s attentions with the bottle he clearly prefers.


Because they can’t or, more likely, won’t join the party, the party inevitably joins them. This allows the world to intrude on personal problems that are already too much in the public domain. Led by Big Mama (Corrine Koslo), the entire family invades Brick and Maggie’s bedroom, determined to celebrate not only Big Daddy’s natal day, but also the clean bill of health with which he has been bestowed by the local doctor (Jay Turvey). While Big Mama fusses and Big Daddy preens, Brick’s elder brother Gooper (Patrick McManus) and his fecund wife Mae (Nicole Underhay) conspire to turn Maggie and Brick’s difficulties to their advantage.


CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF has always relied on the complex triangle between Brick, Maggie and Big Daddy for its strength. But here, working on a set created by Sue LePage, Holmes conspires to turn it into a more complex family drama, in which the magnificent performances of O’Connell, Powell and Mezon are supported by equally fine, even sympathetic work from a strong supporting cast.
She has also managed a subtle shift in emphasis, so that homophobia, rather than homosexuality, becomes the ugly little secret at the heart of the story — a shift that hopefully reflects a shift in public attitude since CAT premièred in 1955.


Finally, it’s not that Holmes has changed the play in any meaningful way (although certainly it is a trifle saltier than I remember it), as much as she has simply dived into it and found a new light to show us what has always been there.