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.
