Arifa Akbar Archives - The Play Podcast

Arifa Akbar

by Douglas Schatz | Feb 9, 2025 | Contributor

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.

Photo by Lydia Nylind

Podcast Episode(s)

091 - Cat on a Hot Tin Roof by Tennessee Williams

Recommended Play(s)

Arifa recommended The Years, based on Les Annees Annie Ernaux, adapted by Eline Arbo, in an English version by Stephanie Bain.

091 – Cat on a Hot Tin Roof by Tennessee Williams

by Douglas Schatz | Jan 28, 2025 | Podcast Episodes

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

Recommended Play

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

We have footnotes for this episode …

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.

Footnotes for Patrons

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The Texts

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115 – The Dance of Death by August Strindberg

Oct 6, 2026 | Podcast Episodes

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August Strindberg’s The Dance of Death is set in a remote army base on the coast of Sweden, where an army captain and his wife are trapped together in an unhappy marriage. The captain, bitter at his lack of promotion, and his wife, frustrated at having been forced to give up her career as an actress, occupy their empty hours tearing into each other in a brutal dance of mutual cruelty.

Strindberg’s scorching portrait of marital strife was written in 1900, but has had a lasting influence. Arthur Miller dubbed Strindberg, “the mad inventor of modern theatre”, and echoes of his unflinching dissection of marital discord can be seen in the plays of Edward Albee, Tennessee Williams, Eugene O’Neill, and John Osborne.

Sir Richard Eyre adapted and directed a wonderful production of Dance of Death at the Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond upon Thames earlier this year, and I am delighted that Sir Richard joins me in this episode to guide us through Strindberg’s blistering onslaught on marriage.

114 – Love’s Labour’s Lost by William Shakespeare

Sep 22, 2026 | Podcast Episodes

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William Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost is described on the title page in the first publication of its text in 1598 as “A Pleasant Conceited Comedie.” I imagine that the epithets were intended to highlight the play’s courtly aesthetic, its frothy merry-go-round of courtship, and above all perhaps, its ostentatiously intricate word play. For it is a play rich in the love and perils of language.

I am joined to assay Shakespeare’s conceited comedy by the Artistic Director of the Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond upon Thames, Tom Littler. In the summer of 2026 Tom adapted and directed a magical double bill of Shakespeare, producing Love’s Labour’s Lost and Much Ado About Nothing in repertory, and staging them both ‘en plein air’.

113 – Arcadia by Tom Stoppard

Aug 24, 2026 | Podcast Episodes

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Tom Stoppard’s 1993 play, Arcadia, is viewed by many as his finest play, renowned for the breadth of its intellectual interrogations and its formal invention. The play is a structural masterpiece of ideas, as well as a teasing detective story, joyous comedy, and emotionally rich exploration of love and loss.

As we record this episode a wonderful new production of Arcadia is playing at the Duke of York’s theatre in London’s West End, following its acclaimed run at the Old Vic theatre earlier this year. I am delighted to share the challenge and the pleasure of exploring Stoppard’s dazzling drama with the director of the new production, Carrie Cracknell.