Cat on a Hot Tin Roof by Tennessee Williams, directed by Gale Edwards. Set and costumes by Stephen Curtis, lighting design by Matt Scott, music composed by Paul Grabowsky. With Essie Davis, Martin Henderson, Rebekah Stone, Deidre Rubenstein, Chris Haywood, Gary Files, Grant Piro and Terry Norris. Melbourne Theatre Company @ the Playhouse Theatre, Victorian Arts Centre until September 13. Bookings: 1300 723 038.

“Personal lyricism,” said Tennessee Williams, “is the outcry of prisoner to prisoner from the cell in solitary where each is confined for the duration of his life.”

It’s a statement that encapsulates the urgency that underlies this playwright’s work, the consuming loneliness which drives its passions. His plays pierce the tragic nature of human consciousness, the awareness which at once makes us understand that we will die and confines us in the solitude of our skulls.


“Ignorance of mortality is a comfort,” says Big Daddy (Chris Haywood) in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. “A man doesn’t have that comfort, he’s the only living thing that conceives of death… a pig squeals, but a man sometimes, he can keep a tight mouth about it…”

This dance between death and silence on the one hand, and desperate outcry, the animal “squeal”, on the other, is the engine of Williams’s great tragedy. Each character in this desperately dysfunctional family is wounded, and it makes each of them cruel.

And each of them talks all the time, a constant babble of words which only reveals a profound inability to communicate. “Communication,” says character after character, “is awful hard between people…”

Language here is a miasma of deception, a weaving of plots and counter-plots as different family members compete for a place in Big Daddy’s will. But, as Williams makes clear, this ruthless greed stems from emotional lack: money is what they seek instead of love.

Director Gale Edwards has chosen to stage Williams’s original play, rather than the slightly less bleak version he wrote for Elia Kazan’s Broadway premiere. It’s a decision that pays off: this is a compelling and powerful production which never shies from Williams’s histrionic excesses or unrelenting cruelties.

Stephen Curtis’s gorgeous set is dominated by a huge bed with a mosquito net which reaches up into the flies, an ironically lush symbol of the play’s variously barren marriages.

Like the set, the performances are heightened, bringing this domestic drama into the arena of classical tragedy. Essie Davis is a magnificent Maggie, at once brittle and tough and vulnerable, and is ably met by Martin Henderson as Brick. And Deidre Rubenstein’s performance of Big Mama is extraordinary: in the final act, her face becomes a tragic mask.

There are quibbles, like Chris Haywood’s wavering accent or a relatively unimaginative sound design. But they remain quibbles. This production picks up Williams’s theatrical poetry and writes it large, in all its painful and mercilessly vital beauty.

Picture: Essie Davis in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Photo: Justin McManus

This review appears in today's Australian. There is much more to say about both Williams and the production, but I have to go to Warrnambool this morning on the Author Track and I don't have the time to rewrite the review.