Like you, I enjoyed the TV show Normal People without having any sense that I desperately wanted to see its co-stars perform in Tennessee Williams plays at the Almeida Theatre, directed by Rebecca Frecknall. But it turns out we were wrong not to desperately want that.
Two years ago Paul Mescal brought a deliciously mephistophelian edge to A Streetcar Named Desire’s antagonist Stanley Kowalski. And now Daisy Edgar-Jones is truly phenomenal as Maggie, the complicated female lead of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. The first act of Tennessee Williams’s 1955 classic is more or less a monologue for Maggie, interspersed by grunts from her booze-addled husband Brick.
It’s basically an opportunity for the actress playing Maggie to show off for an hour and then have relatively little to do for the rest of the play. It has a tendency to attract screen stars wanting to prove their stage chops in one intense burst and then chill out for a bit – Scarlett Johansson was the last Big American Maggie, Sienna Miller the last Brit one.
I guess Edgar-Jones is doing the same, but she is so, so good, inhabiting Maggie with a burning, vivacious swagger, alternatively self-mocking, self-pitying, compassionate and vicious in her diatribe to Kingsley Ben-Adir’s Brick about the wretched state of their marriage. Sometimes she feels like a stand-up comedian, at others a fey spirit. ‘I’m Maggie the cat!’ she repeatedly declares, leaping on the piano or crawling on all fours, and at moments it seems like more than a nickname, like she’s some trickster god.
Chloe Lamford’s claustrophobic, silver-panelled set is dominated by that piano, which is topped by Brick’s prodigious booze collection, and an ever ticking metronome. There is also an unspeaking, unacknowledged pianist (Seb Carrington) playing it, teasing out jazzy tinkles or discordant shrieks. At first he just seems to be A Musician, the same idea as the drummer in Frecknall’s Streetcar. But around the start of the second act it becomes apparent that he on some level represents Skipper, Brick’s dead best friend, whose passing has all but destroyed Brick.
In a performance the tonal opposite of Edgar-Smith’s, Ben-Adir spends much of the play horizontal and virtually catatonic. Brick was always taciturn, but Ben-Adir takes it to a new level; terrific acting, but sacrificing showing off to the greater good of the play. His Brick is simply too drunk and too miserable to give us anything flashy. I thought it worked tremendously, adding to the production’s creeping horror-show atmosphere while also somewhat redeeming Brick. When he threatens to smack Maggie it’s the impotent mumblings of a sad drunk; he is not going to do it, he can’t do it, and there is little evidence he wants to do it.
If Frecknall directs Cat on a Hot Tin Roof as a sort of Southern Gothic, then the horror here is the hell of other people. Everyone is trapped with everyone else. At first it’s Brick’s hysterically annoying nephews and nieces, who Maggie starts her monologue by ripping into. But by the end of the first act it’s apparent that the free-spirited Maggie is trapped by her love of Brick, which she utterly resents; Brick is trapped by his guilt over Skipper’s death and the claims about the nature of their friendship; Skipper’s unspeaking shade seems literally bound to the room; and the extended family is trapped by the gravity-like pull of patriarch Big Daddy’s money.
Gathered to celebrate his sixty-fifth birthday, everyone apart from the man himself (Lenny James) and his hapless wife Big Mama (Clare Burt) knows he’s dying of cancer (he has been told he is all clear bar a ‘spastic colon’ - the repeated use of the phrase ‘spastic colon’ is very funny). The vultures are gathering to carve up the estate, most especially Brick’s grasping, cowardly older brother Gooper (Ukwell Roach) and his bitchy, rapacious wife Mae (Pearl Chanda). They don’t want to leave without a settlement that favours them. But they’re also too craven to say it to Big Daddy’s face.
Using what I believe is Williams’s own potty-mouthed 1974 revision of the play, James drops copious f-bombs as the take-no-shit, Trumpian Big Daddy. Humourless and unfeeling, he instinctively treats everyone around him like crap – everyone apart from Brick. Ben-Adir plays the character so crushed and pathetic that it’s hard not to see Big Daddy’s obvious love of him as somewhat redemptive – there is an honesty to Brick’s total collapse that you sense the older man on some level admires. Meanwhile his contempt for the much more competent Gooper is simply very funny. The production reaches its doomy apex as Brick finally unburdens himself of his guilt to his father, and his father rages back, under Lee Curran’s remarkable lighting – apocalyptic washes of primary colours that represent birthday fireworks but look like a war.
Not everyone is going to love Frecknall’s doomy reimagining of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, in which Big Daddy’s mansion is a house of trapped spirits. But amidst the gloom, there’s a glimmer – what makes Frecknall’s Tennessee Williams productions so powerful is that she always manages to find the goodness in his cracked characters, always makes us care about them. Maggie, Brick, even Big Daddy - there is still light in this infernal darkness, in these anything but normal people.
