STAGE
Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, Novello Theatre
4/5
IN A NUTSHELL
Debbie Allen updates Tennessee Williams' 1955 tale of a Southern family confronting secrets and lies over the course of Big Daddy's 65th birthday.
REVIEW
Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, set in the American South, took me to Albert Square, circa Christmas 1985.
There, amid a cascade of domestic feuding, Queen Vic landlady Angie might or might not have a fatal cancer. Den knows the truth but is keeping quiet till he can play his hand to best advantage.
Although it is Dallas rather than EastEnders that has inspired director Debbie Allen's update on Tennessee Williams' savage tale of family strife, the question mark over mortality is the same engine of revelation.
Millionaire Big Daddy's impending death, or otherwise, galvanises his family into action, jostling for position to take advantage of the grumpy old coot's abrogation from tyranny.
Bitter poison courses through this family. Big Daddy is addled by rogue cells, Brick, the favoured son, is mindlessly adrift on a sea of alcohol while offspring and in-laws circle with schemes and strategies to win favours and to do their rivals down.
Big Daddy barks at these incessant upstarts, swatting them away like a big-pawed lion with its cubs but, in the hands of velvety James Earl Jones, the patriarch withholds the fatal bite. He humiliates his wife Big Mama (a grandly brassy turn from Phylicia "Mrs Cosby" Rashad) but she lives in hope that her devotion will win back his approval and Jones always leaves enough to suggest reconciliation is possible.
Freed - he believes - from the curse of cancer, Jones's Big Daddy laughs like a birthday boy, hip thrusts and rolls like a vulgarian and melts at the sight of his son's self-destruction - setting up a touching, if fleeting, moment of empathy between the two brusque masters of indifference.
Brick (Adrian Lester) is the quiet epicentre of the play. He is strangely absent, caught in a world of sulky evasion, dwelling on his doomed friendship with his friend, Skipper, and its unpalatable implications for his sexuality.
Even (and perhaps inevitably) the sinuous attentions of frustrated Maggie the Cat, (a sultry and superb Sanaa Lathan), cannot stir her husband to rouse himself either for her or for the pursuit of his inheritance. Lester finds what he can in the role although his hard-won breakdown fails to deliver the catharsis that the ominous tone had promised.
Director Debbie Allen may be more comfortable with belly laughs than gut-punches and has about her a cast with the same outlook (Richard Blackwood and Derek Griffiths have walk-ons) but this is still a powerful and intermittently moving interpretation - lyrical and endlessly fascinating.
In other revivals, Lathan and Lester would have taken the curtain. Here it could only be Jones and Rashad, evoking wonder and warmth with or without a script.
Oh... and this an all-black cast. Did I not mention that? Doesn't seem important now.
