Cat On A Hot Tin Roof review and star rating: ★★
Rebecca Frecknall is hoping for a third strike of luck with Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, her third Tennessee Williams production at the Almeida following the buzzy Streetcar Named Desire with hot-boy-of-the-moment Paul Mescal, and 2019’s Summer and Smoke. The Gladiator II actor wasn’t in the audience to watch his Normal People co-star Daisy Edgar-Jones play Maggie last night, but that wasn’t the only way the evening felt unstarry: this version of Streetcar only skims the surface, rarely getting into the darkness at the heart of Williams’ play about trauma, ageing and identity.
Frecknall’s production feels paced like a sitcom. Characters are rarely given long enough to languish over a line, or enough pause to extract the dramatic effect from Williams’ biting playtext. Streetcar is long – some productions skim close to four hours – but it’s not that this 180-minute experience bores. More that it washes over you like a soap opera, the characters feeling one-note.
As young lover Maggie, Daisy Edgar-Jones is irritating, never defusing from a perpetual state of angry-shouty-indoor voice in the first act that quickly loses potency. She falls short of putting her own stamp on the embittered female, even if much of that is down to the direction.
Cat On A Hot Tin Roof review: a paint-by-numbers exercise in storytelling
In act one Maggie is furious at her partner Brick for his drunkenness, refusal to sleep with her and disinterest in protecting his family fortune from the clutches of his brother and sister-in-law as news that the family patriarch, Big Daddy, has become unwell.
Kingsley Ben-Adir is more enigmatic as the curled-up-in-a-corner Brick; when he shouts, you listen, because he’s so often silently agonising in his own ennui. Lennie James is often formidable as Big Daddy, even if Frecknall’s frenetic direction often has him and the wider cast pacing around with a weird effervescence given these are people whose worldview is imploding.
The most interesting character ends up being Seb Carrington’s Pianist, a new role projecting the internalised sexual desires of Brick. His piano playing and animalistic choreography are nice tonal scene-setters that ground us in the darkness missing elsewhere.
Tenseness is also diffused by occasions of over-production: a revelation about Big Daddy’s health layered with reverb and electronic drum-beat feels OTT.
Chloe Lamford’s set design – one high-ceilinged gold-hued room with a piano in it – feels expansive but for no obvious reason, stylishly one-note, like much of the rest. It ramps up by the end of the third act when you eventually get to spend a moment with a character properly agonising in real-time, but it’s a rare instance in a production that too often feels like a paint-by-numbers exercise in storytelling.
Cat On A Hot Tin Roof plays at the Almeida Theatre until 1 February 2025