In Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, a powerful Southern family gathers at a birthday celebration for patriarch Big Daddy (Jones), who does not know that he is dying of cancer. In a scramble to secure their part of his estate, family members hide the truth about his diagnosis from him and Big Mama (Rashad). Tensions mount between alcoholic former football hero Brick (Lester) and his beautiful but sexually frustrated wife Maggie "the Cat" (Sanaa). As their troubled relationship comes to a stormy and steamy climax, a shockwave of secrets is finally revealed. Brimming with trademark emotional intensity and insightful wit, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is an American treasure. Don't miss this bold new staging of Tenessee Williams' rich and timeless family portrait.
Reviews
The Evening Standard
Henry Hitchings
"Cat on a Hit Tin Roof is a strangely jagged drama, powerful in its depiction of moral crisis yet uneven and ambiguous. Debbie Allen’s direction, best in the two-handed scenes, can’t conceal this, and the updating of the setting to the 1980s makes it less plausible that Brick’s sexual confusion would cause him deep anxiety. Still, even if the production could do with more fierceness, it packs a big emotional punch, and the face-off between Brick and Big Daddy in the second act is a triumph."
02/12/2009
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The Daily Express
Paul Callan
"The issues the play deals with could apply to any ethnic group. You could produce a Mongolian version – and still make all the points of family mendacity and greed."
02/12/2009
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The Guardian
Michael Billington
"But ethnicity matters less than emotional firepower and an awareness of the essential Williams conflict between lies and truth; and both are abundantly present in this exhilarating evening."
02/12/2009
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The Independent
Paul Taylor
"What is remarkable, though, about Allen's compelling, sensitive and acerbically comic production is how swiftly you become so absorbed by the universal elements in the story that you almost completely forget about the counter-intuitive colour of the actors' skins."
03/12/2009
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The Independent on Sunday
Kate Bassett
"Timelessly poignant."
06/12/2009
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The Stage
Mark Shenton
"It also lets us see a familiar play through fresh eyes, and gives a sterling company of American and British actors the opportunity to claim it defiantly and definitively for themselves, too. This production, first staged on Broadway last year by director Debbie Allen, sees the towering, glowering James Earl Jones (now 78) and Phylicia Rashad reprise their magnificent New York turns as the father and mother at the heart of this wrenching drama, and they lend it both gravitas and grit."
02/12/2009
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The Daily Telegraph
Charles Spencer
"By shifting the setting of the action from the still segregationist Fifties to the more tolerant Eighties, it is surprisingly easy to accept that this play could just as easily be about wealthy black, rather than white, Americans. Indeed, race quickly ceases to be an issue at all, thanks to some tremendous performances from the Anglo-American cast in this harrowing but often blackly comic drama of dysfunctional family life."
02/12/2009
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The Times
Benedict Nightingale
"Though Williams thought Cat his best play, “the one that comes closest to being a work of art and a work of craft”, it isn’t faultless. It’s awfully wordy. Even Peter de Jersey, who does much to bring out the elder son’s sense of rejection, can’t hide the fact that he and his wife are caricatures, so sly yet crude is their determination to inherit Big Daddy’s estate. Yet the true, touching moments more than compensate."
02/12/2009
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The Sunday Times
Christopher Hart
"Still, this remains a middling production that, for all the rather self-conscious on-stage steaminess, and a couple of fine performances, never really catches fire."
06/12/2009
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The Spectator
Lloyd Evans
"Bennett’s decision to write two plays in one doesn’t solve the basic problem: no ending, no dramatic turning point. The play drifts badly in the third act and the tedious final quarter of an hour is enlivened only by a top-notch gag about the National Theatre feeling like a leisure centre: Cottesloe, snooker-hall; Lyttelton, boxing venue; Olivier, ice-rink."
25/11/2009
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The Observer
Susannah Clapp
"It inspired a whole dramatic dynasty of squalling beauties and sullen husbands; without it, August: Osage County and Dallas might never have existed. It is massively too much chewed over, and over-metaphored illness hangs like a moral tag around the necks of characters. Yet it also tilts unexpectedly into scourging dialogues. Allen's production catches both aspects of the play: its lumbering explicitness and its wonderful surges. The first half straggles; the second half soars."
06/12/2009
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