Cat On a Hot Tin Roof at the Almeida review: Daisy Edgar-Jones is a force of nature in this striking revival
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But though Maggie is the title character she is not the sole lead. Indeed she’s forced to carry a massive weight of exposition in the first hour, before being shunted offstage entirely for the central section between her alcoholic husband Brick (Kingsley Ben-Adir, bringing nuance to stumbles and slurs) and his brutal plantation-owner father Big Daddy (Lennie James, terrifying).
Director Rebecca Frecknall separates the play’s three acts with an interval and a pause, showing how husband and wife, father and son, and then the entire family lie to themselves and each other. This is her third emotionally distilled but stylistically abstract take on a Williams play at the Almeida after triumphant versions of Summer and Smoke and A Streetcar Named Desire.
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Those shows were cast colourblind: here it matters that the dying Big Daddy, the overseer who took over and transformed a cotton plantation owned by two white “sissies”, is Black, while his reviled but adoring wife (Clare Burt, excellent) is white. It adds depth to his ferocity and weight to the issues of inheritance and legacy. Race becomes a factor alongside sexuality, mortality, dominance and duplicity.
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Frecknall floats us into a world that’s not the 1950s nor quite modern. The clothes are odd, ugly, non-period. Chloe Lamford’s set is a stark room clad in stamped metal tiles, with three large apertures and a porous fourth wall to facilitate eavesdropping (being observed is a key theme). Pianist Seb Carrington plays jarring chords on a grand piano that doubles as a drinks trolley: he is the ghost of Brick’s football teammate Skipper, the third person in his marriage to Maggie – a deft touch.
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