Daisy Edgar-Jones as Maggie
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
Almeida Theatre, December 2024
Photo by Marc Brenner

Maggie’s desires
One of the most powerful and poignant elements of the play is the strength of Maggie’s unsatisfied sexual desire for Brick. She spends much of the first act essentially trying to seduce him. She refers half-jokingly to Big Daddy having a “lech for her”, telling Brick that he “drops his eyes down my body when I’m talkin’ to him, drops his eyes to my boobs an’ licks his old chops”. There may be some truth in this – but it is said to provoke Brick, to make him focus on her sexual attractiveness. She eggs him further by saying that other men still find her attractive.

But it’s Brick she wants, telling him that he was “a wonderful lover“ and that “if I thought that you would never, never, never make love to me again – I would go downstairs to the kitchen and pick out the longest and sharpest knife I could find and stick it straight into my heart, I swear that I would!” We are left in no doubt about her desire.

How humiliating and wounding it is for her to be rejected by him. Williams signals the understandable frustration and pain it causes her in a stage direction that reads, “It is constant rejection that makes her humor ‘bitchy’.”

But Maggie not only desires Brick, she loves him.  As she says to him, “Later tonight I’m going to tell you I love you an’ maybe by that time you’ll be drunk enough to believe me.” It’s not that she doesn’t love him, but that he doesn’t love her or believe in anything. And most poignantly she knows it, “Living with someone you love can be lonelier – than living entirely alone! – if the one that y’love doesn’t love you…”.

The more that she tries to coax him in to bed, the harder he pushes back, reminding her of the deal that she agreed to,”the conditions on which I agreed to stay on living with you”, he says. Which we assume are that he will not end the marriage, if she leaves him alone – doesn’t press him to make love to her. But for Maggie, this is intolerable. “They’re impossible conditions”, she cries,”I can’t live on and on under these circumstances.” Except that she does, like “a cat on a hot tin roof“, the victory is “just staying on I guess, as long as she can.” And she is hanging on, fighting her corner with Brick and the family, no matter the heat or the pain.

As a footnote, the title of the play came from Tennessee Williams’s father, who according to his son, “had a great gift for phrases.” His father used to say to his wife, “Edwina, you’re making me as nervous as a cat on a hot tin roof.”  Williams has turned the table here, with it being the wife caught on the roof, and the metaphor standing for a more profound anguish.

Kingsley Ben-Adir as Brick
Photo by Marc Brenner

Skipper
Of course, Maggie saw that there was more to it than that, at least on Skipper’s part. She confronted him: “Skipper! Stop lovin’ my husband or tell him he’s got to let you admit it to him”. To prove her wrong, Skipper attempts to make love to her, but according to Maggie, it was a “pitiful, ineffectual little attempt to prove that what I said wasn’t true.”

And as Brick tells it to Big Daddy, when “it didn’t work out…” Skipper…”thought it was true”.  In this account, Brick seems to be trying to tell himself that Skipper got it wrong, but it is more likely to be his projection onto Skipper – a further denial that Skipper could have been queer or had been conscious of it.

Maggie was partly driven by jealousy – she wanted her husband to make love to her again. “And so we made love to each other to dream it was you, both of us!”, she tells Brick. What a telling line that encapsulates her and Skipper’s respective longing. Maggie believes that her pushing Skipper to face the truth destroyed him, “by telling him truth that he and his world which he was born and raised in, your and his world, had told him could not be told”. A truth that as a product of this world, Brick also cannot accept. 

Maggie understood that Brick could never allow it to happen. “it couldn’t be anything else, you being you, and that’s what made it so sad, that’s what made it so awful, because it was love that never could be carried through to anything satisfying or even talked about plainly.” Maggie realised that what they felt “had to be kept on ice”, and as it turned out “death was the only icebox where you could keep it.”

 For Brick however, Maggie has gone too far, “naming it dirty”. But it is a truth he cannot now unknow, nor properly admit, whether he was previously conscious of it or not. Williams wrote to director Elia Kazan in advance of the Broadway production, alluding to Brick’s lack of consciousness of his potential homosexuality, referring to people who “have deep attachments, idealistic, romantic: sublimated loves… Their innocence, their blindness, makes them very, very touching, very beautiful and sad…But if a mask is ripped off, suddenly, roughly, that’s quite enough to blast the whole Mechanism, the whole adjustment, knock the world out from under their feet, and leave them no alternative but – owning up to the truth or retreat into something like liquor.”

Tennessee Williams in 1955
the year of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
Photo by Ara Guler

The women
It must be said that the women in this play don’t have a very good time with their men. Big Mama and Maggie are both with men who don’t want their love, and don’t love them back. In fact, the men are actively revolted by their wives, and the women subjugate themselves in the face of their cruelty.

Big Daddy is especially vicious to Big Mama, and she just keeps on taking it. A stage direction describes her “simple-minded devotion to Big Daddy”. She says doggedly that she loves him, “I even loved your hate and your hardness.”  One can understand the irritation caused by her grandiose faux happiness and fussiness, but it is hard to watch his relentless assault and her vain attempts to deflect him or downplay his meaning. Another stage direction signals the pain that she absorbs from his attacks: “Big Daddy is famous for his jokes at Big Mama’s expense, and nobody laughs louder at these jokes than Big Mama herself, though sometimes they’re pretty cruel and Big Mama has to pick up or fuss with something to cover the hurt that her loud laugh doesn’t quite cover.”

Her husband’s abuse feels all the more unjust given that she has kept everything going while he has been ill, for which perversely he does not thank her but blames her. In the end, we can’t but admire Big Mama for taking a stand against Gooper and Mae’s pre-emptive inheritance claim, fighting to retain her authority and primary legal rights.

Likewise, Maggie fights her corner. As she says, “my hat is still in the ring, and I am determined to win.”  Even when Brick hurls his disgust in her face – “how in hell on earth do you imagine – that you’re going to have a child by a man that can’t stand you?”  – she does not retreat, “That’s a problem that I will have to work out.”  Finally, as the play closes Maggie even feels stronger than Brick. It is hard to bet against her.

Gooper and Mae
Gooper and Mae may also feel hard done by. They think that they’ve played the game by the rules and are unjustly treated. But Williams doesn’t let us sympathise with them. They try too hard – their currying for favour is just too obvious. The way that they push the “no-neck monsters” forward to perform for Big Daddy is excruciating, and in fact ineffective. Big Daddy doesn’t even know how many kids they have, and he hates their noise.

One may have some sympathy for Gooper, who having done everything his father asked of him in his life, knows he is not the favoured son. A fate made searingly explicit when Big Mama cries “Where’s Brick? Where is my only son?” in her distress at having been told of Big Daddy’s cancer.

Williams rather loads the moral scales against Gooper and Mae, however in Act 3. Their premeditated plan for succession comes across as cold and grasping. The shine of their performative propriety is undermined by their ordering the servants about, and fighting amongst themselves – Gooper repeatedly telling Mae to shut up. Their behaviour is shown to be mendacious, in keeping with the play’s moral theme.

Kingsley Ben-Adir as Brick and
Lennie James as Big Daddy
Photo by Marc Brenner