Daisy Edgar-Jones as Maggie
and Kingsley Ben-Adir as Brick
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
Almeida Theatre, London, December 2024
Photo by Marc Brenner
091 – Cat on a Hot Tin Roof by Tennessee Williams
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The family gathers to mark plantation owner Big Daddy’s 65th birthday, but shadows loom over the celebrations. Big Daddy is dying of cancer, and the next generation are manoeuvring to inherit his wealth. Big Daddy’s favourite son Brick’s marriage to Maggie is in trouble. He is drinking heavily, and they are apparently no longer sleeping together and have not produced any children to support their potential inheritance claim. Over the course of a few hours of Big Daddy’s birthday, Maggie and Brick and the rest of the family, slug it out as they compete for favour, telling lies and repressing uncomfortable truths.
This is Tennessee Williams’s third great play, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. When Williams wrote the play between 1953 and 1955, he had had two major successes as a playwright: his breakthrough hit, The Glass Menagerie in 1945, followed by A Streetcar Named Desire in 1947. Three other less successful plays had followed Streetcar onto Broadway, so by the time he wrote A Cat on Hot Tin Roof, Williams was in need of a success, which this proved to be.
As we record this episode, an innovative new production of the play is currently running at the Almeida theatre in London, directed by Rebecca Frecknall, and starring Daisy Edgar-Jones and Kingsley Ben-Adir. The play’s portrait of family conflict and repressed sexuality retains all of its unsettling power.
I am delighted to be joined to review the domestic carnage of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof by the Guardian newspaper’s Chief Theatre Critic, Arifa Akbar.
Arifa Akbar
Arifa Akbar is the chief theatre critic for the Guardian Newspaper. Arifa has previously been literary editor at The Independent, as well as a news reporter and arts correspondent. Her first book, Consumed: In Search of my Sister, her moving memoir about the illness and premature death of her sister was published in 2021, and was shortlisted for a number of awards. Her second book, Wolf Moon will be published later this year.
Arifa recommended The Years, based on Les Annees Annie Ernaux, adapted by Eline Arbo, in an English version by Stephanie Bain.
Photo by Lydia Nylind
The Footnotes that accompany our episode on Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof include observations on Maggie’s desire for Brick; Brick’s feelings for Maggie; what happened between Skipper and Maggie, and Brick’s denial; how Williams projected his own torments into his characters; the subjugation of the women; Gooper and Mae’s performances; and Brick and Big Daddy’s existential battle.
112 – Glengarry Glen Ross by David Mamet
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David Mamet’s modern American classic, Glengarry Glen Ross, is a blistering commentary on the cut-throat reality of the American dream, and its poisonous impact on those who have bought into the myth and machismo of that dream. The play had its world premiere in the small Cottesloe theatre at the National Theatre in London in September 1983, and was first performed in New York the following year, winning the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Mamet also wrote the extended screenplay for the star-studded 1992 film version.
As we recorded this episode a new production of the play was playing at the Old Vic theatre in London, with an all-female cast. This is a particularly provocative idea, because one of the primary themes of this play is masculine identity, and the salesmen in this Chicago office do not hold back in their display of machismo.
To explore Mamet’s unflinching slice of 1980s dog-eat-dog capitalism, I am joined by arts journalist Mark Lawson.
111 – The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui by Bertolt Brecht
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Bertolt Brecht’s ‘gangster spectacle’, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, is both an exuberant and funny piece of theatre, and a chillingly topical political satire. Set in the 1930s Chicago of Al Capone, Brecht presents a parody of the rise of Hitler through the character of the gangster Arturo Ui. The play is a universal cry for vigilance against the rise of unscrupulous, populist leaders who threaten democratic societies and global peace.
As we recorded this episode a new production of the play by the Royal Shakespeare Company was playing in Stratford-upon-Avon, starring Mark Gatiss as the title character.
I am delighted to be joined by both the show’s translator, playwright Stephen Sharkey, and by Brecht scholar, Professor Tom Kuhn, to guide us through Brecht’s political parody.
110 – Our Town by Thornton Wilder
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Playwright Edward Albee described Thornton Wilder’s Our Town as “the greatest American play ever written.” In fact Wilder’s quintessential portrait of rural America in a bygone time has somehow transcended its iconic American setting to become a universal meditation on mortality, community, and how we live our individual lives, wherever that may be.
The play premiered on Broadway in 1938, winning Wilder the Pulitzer Prize, and it has been a staple of school, amateur and stock performance ever since. In fact, according to critic John Lahr writing in the introduction to the text of the Penguin edition, “the play is performed somewhere in the world every day.”
Howard Sherman, author of Another Day’s Begun – Thornton Wilder’s Our Town in the 21st Century, joins me to explore this American classic.
Michael Sheen as the Stage Manager in Our Town, Welsh National Theatre, photo by Helen Murray.
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