Imagine: a musical based on a bunch of poems by T.S. Eliot, about moggies… and they think that will fill the West End’s biggest theatre for 12 weeks! It will, of course, although it remains as eccentric an idea as it was when it premièred in 1981 (and nevertheless ran for 21 years). But this revisitation will do the business, simply because it is Cats. And what is Cats? You know already. I don’t think I have ever seen a show that is so completely and utterly just what you expect.
    
You know the Lycra-and-legwarmers look of the cast (much less funky and transgressive now). You know the junkyard setting and the strategy of having the purrformers roam through the audience, although that aspect is greatly attenuated in a traditionally-structured theatre such as the Palladium. You certainly feel as if you know Andrew Lloyd Webber’s score, which tends towards the light-pop end of his repertoire rather than the light-classical (although the latter vein yields the show’s best-known number “Memory”, sung movingly by former Pussycat Doll and X Factor judge Nicole Scherzinger as Grizabella). You know the arrangements, which are unregenerate 1980s, right down to the artificial-brass synthesizer sounds used. And you know the English whimsy of (American-born) Eliot’s verse, a series of portraits of idiosyncratic felines, except when an occasional extract from Four Quartets is imported to add a touch of metaphysics. All of which Trevor Nunn’s production, on John Napier’s set design, with Gillian Lynne’s more or less uninterrupted choreography, delivers now as it did a third of a century ago.
    
What it delivers is very much on its own terms. It strikes me that Cats is tellingly like cats themselves: you rather need to be a cat person in the first place, prepared to accept their scratches, be fascinated by them doing just what they choose to do and accept that the entire relationship is determined by whim, and not by yours at that. In only one respect is Cats like dogs: you can be fairly sure that despite the claims of limited run, they’ll return in due course and settle down for another long stay.
     
Written for the Financial Times.