Zahra Newman as Maggie. Photo: Daniel Boud
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, with Zahra Newman as the titular cat Maggie, opens with her rendition of Cry Me A River, in which she holds the stage like a sultry cabaret star in a dark nightclub. It continues with an electric, sometimes frenzied, often bleakly humorous performance in which we learn she despises her brother-in-law Gooper, his wife Mae and their five ‘no neck children’; that one of the many big secrets the Pollitt family is keeping is that ‘Big Daddy’ Pollitt, its massively wealthy cotton patriarch, is dying of cancer (although he and ‘Big Mama’ have been told he has a clean bill of health); and that Maggie is sexually frustrated because her husband Brick – a one-time sports star turned raging alcoholic – refuses to sleep with her.
Newman is quite simply superb and the first act – almost a monologue – is hers, which is not to detract from Harry Greenwood’s Brick, Pamela Rabe’s Big Mama, Nikki Shiels’ Mae, Josh McConville’s Gooper – and the troop of little red-haired Pollitts, whose irritating childhood antics serve to break and sometimes increase tensions in a play full of deceit, ambition and the looming shadow of death. Director Kip Williams has assembled a wonderful cast. Big Daddy himself – in the charismatic form of one of the world’s best actors, Hugo Weaving – does not appear until the end of Act 1. When he does take to the stage, looking every inch patriarchal and presidential, he does not need to speak to make his power felt. Enter Big Daddy, close Act 1.
Act 2 belongs to Weaving, whose stage presence is awesome. Big Daddy is a selfish, ruthless monster, and Weaving makes him so. The tensions ratchet up as he bignotes himself while he tries to understand why Brick, the favoured son, cannot ditch the bottle. No one, least of all Brick, is going to utter the word ‘homosexuality’, but this and the death of his friend Skipper is what is driving Brick’s downfall and Maggie’s unhappiness. Nothing much can get through to Greenwood’s Brick, at least until the confrontation with his father that spins the story around.
Mendacity is the key theme that runs through Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Everyone lies. Gooper and Mae want to get their hands on the property, but mask their avarice in concern; Big Daddy lies to Big Mama, but tells Brick how much she disgusts him; Brick and Big Mama deceive themselves; Maggie says she loves Brick, but does she? Is it Brick she wants, or a buffer against the poverty she left behind? At the close of the play, Maggie tells the biggest lie of all.
This is one very unhappy family; and one helluva a great play, with a great ensemble of actors. In the two major roles, Newman and Weaving are magnificent; Shiels is impressive as the self-satisfied and fertile Mae; and Rabe is almost unrecognisable as Big Mama, as off-balance in her high-heeled shoes as her character is in life. The tension never flags, especially important in a piece that runs for two hours and fifty minutes.
The set (David Fleischer)and lighting (Nick Schlieper) though are contentious. For a play set in the steamy Mississippi basin, with references to humidity and mosquitoes, it is odd to be looking at a brightly lit, stark black, white and mirrored set that is more like a hotel room or a huge dressing room than a plantation house in the deep south. Perhaps it is supposed to represent the emptiness of the characters’ inner lives? Anyway, it’s odd. Likewise the representation of fireworks; a huge wall of gold searchlights that boom and blind. Okay, we get the idea but not the reasoning. Elsewhere composer Stefan Gregory’s sound design is more subtle and highly effective, especially in the closing scenes.
Reservations aside, this is a memorable and powerful production. It’s on until 8 June. Recommended.
By Carrie Kablean
