CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF
Image: Photo by Heidrun Lohr
The cat is back, but in this Simon Stone-directed adaptation of the Pulitzer-winning play Tennessee Williams christened his favourite, she must first trip over a last-minute casting change, navigate a trickily rotating stage, and tackle dialogue deeply mired in the American Deep South … all with an Aussie strain.
It’s Big Daddy’s birthday bash at the plantation, and the hordes have arrived: Gooper and his clan of ‘no-neck monsters’; ex-footballer now fulltime lush Brick (Ewen Leslie) and his jumpy dissatisfied wife Maggie ‘the Cat,’ (Jacqueline McKenzie). It’s a hotbed of untruths and resentments that only get stickier as the night wears on.
While in the past Stone has been accused of meddling with his material overmuch (namely his ‘cavalier’ cut to crucial final scenes in last year’s Death of a Salesman), here the Cat goes nearly entirely unruffled. Rightly, the Southerner twang has been dropped in favour of immediacy and believability. But with clunky references to Memphis remaining, we are left in a strange theatrical netherworld between the States and Sydney.
McKenzie is delicate and electric as Maggie, while Marshall Napier as the last-minute replacement for Anthony Phelan does an excellent job as Big Daddy, script in hand notwithstanding. The famed denouement between the two Pollitt men, with its reinstated homosexual undertones, fares quite well considering the short time in which they had to build chemistry.
The rotating stage is clever, as one generation marches on over the top of the last, with cast members ducking and weaving through coloured streamers with forced gaiety.
Overall, it’s a production trying very hard to please, much like the frantic Maggie and her ‘enviably cool’ husband Brick. But does it please enough?
Until Apr 7, Belvoir St Theatre, 25 Belvoir St, Surry Hills, 9699 3444, $35-90, belvoir.com.au
