Review: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof - The Jewish Chronicle

The question that has nagged at this Broadway production of Tennessee Williams’s play is: why an all-black cast? After all, the family that populates Williams’s drama is rich, white and headed by Big Daddy, a formidable southern patriarch referred to by his daughter-in-law Maggie as a redneck. The favourite son, Brick, is an ex-American football hero now lost to alcohol, his drinking driven by the self-disgust that he has been brought up to feel about men who love other men.

It is a play whose dialogue is steeped in the language of white, southern bigotry. At least it used to be.

Director Debbie Allen has removed the redneck reference, eliminated Maggie’s mention of her family freeing slaves and has deployed the four-letter words that were later inserted by Williams into his script — in 1955, when the play was first staged, the f-word was as taboo as homosexuality.

Since rehearsals began in London last month, that question about race has been calmly batted away by Allen and the show’s biggest star James Earl Jones — albeit a little irritably according to at least one report.

But if the question is understandable, if only because all-black productions of plays previously performed by white actors are still rare, then so too is the world-weary response. Allen’s view is that the colour of the cast is incidental. And you would have to be a bit bonkers to disagree. For if you sit watching a production of this play thinking about the colour of the actors’ skin, something is either very wrong with the production or with you.

And though it could be said that the shifts in context (the period has also been shunted forward from the ’50s to the ’80s) allows it to address African-American attitudes towards gay people — a subject that President Obama has spoken about — even that virtue is little more than a distraction in a play that reveals deeper truths about how lies are lived by, how families communicate with each other, and particularly how fathers and sons spend a lifetime failing to understand each other.

For this London run, Adrian Lester takes on the role of the sullen son Brick, trapped by a broken leg into having conversations he does not want to have. The first is with Sanaa Lathan’s sultry Maggie, whose love for Brick is undiminished by his sexual disinterest. Nor is her desperation to conceive.

The second is with Jones’s Big Daddy — and it is with Jones that this production really takes off. Never has a patriarch been more disgruntled with his kin. It is Big Daddy’s birthday, and even though he has just been given a reprieve (fake, as it turns out) from cancer, he cannot hide his contempt for those members of his family who clucked around him, hoping that his death would bring a hefty legacy their way.

Not that he tries to hide his contempt. Jones is a marvellous bad-tempered Buddha. His gravely baritone doles out devastating truths to and about his aspirational son and daughter-in-law (Peter De Jersey as the perspiring older son and Nina Sosanya as his ambitious wife, are terrific), and about his long-suffering wife Big Mama, played by a regal Phylicia Rashad.

Morgan Large’s airy design sets the action in what feels like a bland five-star hotel rather than a southern mansion. There is no sense of summer, nor southern heat. Everyone is cool, at least physically if not temperamentally. And for a while the performances struggle to fill the space. But this is a problem eventually diminished by the focus of Williams’s writing, and the ruthless compassion with which he peels back this family’s hitherto unspoken truths.

And by the time Lathan’s shallow, preening Maggie is revealed to be what she is — a loyal and determined spouse who is trapped by the same conventions as her husband — both play and performances have won us over.

In his first stage performance since his National Theatre Henry V — another production that swatted away racial conventions — Lester is terrific. When the brooding manliness cracks, it would have been tempting to go for full-on emotional breakdown. But Lester keeps a hold of the reigns. The distance he maintains is only briefly closed before the whisky takes him away. And by the time he drifts off, the fact that this great play is performed by an all-black cast is exactly what it should be — utterly irrelevant.

(Tel: 0844 482 5170)