CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF
Apollo Theatre, London W1
Opened 24 July, 2017
****

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.

Copyright © Ian Shuttleworth; all rights reserved.

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