The first time I saw Sienna Miller
onstage, I said her acting was energetic but superficial. However, that
was a dozen years ago. Now, in Benedict Andrews’ revival of
Cat On A Hot Tin Roof in the West
End (under the auspices of the Young Vic), the energy remains but she
gets right to the heart of Maggie the titular cat. I don’t think this
is because Tennessee Williams seldom buries the essence of his
characters very deep; especially in the first act, Miller’s Maggie puts
a keenly sardonic topspin on many of her lines and successfully keeps
the whole business going at a decent pace, given how much of the
talking she has to do in the face of near-silence from Maggie’s husband
Brick. All this plus a Deep South accent that makes Vivien Leigh sound
like Ray Winstone. Whereas Jack O’Connell as Brick just sounds like Ray
Winstone.
That’s unfair; O’Connell’s accent settles down in his second-act duet
with Colm Meaney’s unusually compassionate Big Daddy, but for much of
the first act his Brick is little more than a brooding presence and a
bunch of out-of-place tattoos. Even in a modern version of Williams’
dramatic world, where Big Mama makes calls on her mobile, Maggie cues
music on her iPad and both she and Brick appear stark naked, he surely
wouldn’t have such coarsely executed inkings, never mind one which
proclaims (legibly from row N) “JACK THE LAD”. It’s to his credit that
he successfully rows back from such unfavourable beginnings.
Andrews likes reinventing space in his stagings. In this version, Brick
and Maggie’s bedroom is a carpeted, sparsely furnished island amid a
huge enclosure of brushed metal in sallow lighting, as if the floor and
all three walls were the tin roof of the title. The shower of which
Brick is so fond is upstage and open on all sides; at the downstage lip
sit a full-size plastic sack of ice cubes, a number of tumblers and
four bottles of whiskey, of which the various members of the Pollitt
family polish off three in the course of the proceedings. But, as she
divines and tries to respond to the various guilts and “mendacities” of
the family, this is Maggie’s show, and Miller’s.
Written for the Financial
Times.