Reviews 2005
Reviews 2005
✭✭✩✩✩
by Tennessee Williams, directed by Richard Monette
Stratford Festival, Avon Theatre, Stratford
June 1-October 29, 2005
“Not So Hot”
The Stratford Festival’s current production of “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” has been mounted to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Tennessee Williams classic’s first production. It is only a lukewarm tribute. Some of the cast are simply not up to the demands Williams makes and director Richard Monette has taken a view of the play at odds with its structure.
Those who know the play only by the famous 1958 film of the same title starring Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman, a film that Williams hated, will be surprised to discover what the play itself it really like. The film removed all references to homosexuality and gave the story a Hollywood feel-good ending in contrast to the highly ambiguous ending of the original. Besides that, Williams revised the play in 1974, spicing up the language with the four-letter words he couldn’t use 20 years before and completely rewriting the third act. It is the 1974 version that Stratford is staging.
The play, set in one room of a plantation mansion in the 1950s, consists of several interlocking struggles. Most obvious is the struggle between two sides of the Pollitt family to inherit the Big Daddy’s plantation. On one side is Big Daddy’s older son Gooper, a lawyer, and his wife Mae, who already have five children with one more on the way. On the other is a childless couple, Big Daddy’s younger but favourite son Brick, a alcoholic former football player and radio announcer, and his wife Margaret, referred to by everyone including herself as Maggie the Cat. Big Daddy has left no will and indeed does not know he is dying of cancer. In fact, a false medical report has led him to believe he is perfectly well except for a spastic colon.
The trick both sides have is first to convince Big Daddy (and his wife Big Mama) on this his 65th birthday that he is dying and second that their side has the better claim on the estate. Gooper’s side is united putting forward both primogeniture and their fertility as justification. Maggie’s side is not. She needs the inheritance in order not to sink back into poverty. Brick, however, has drunk himself daily into a stupor since the death of his best friend Skipper, cares nothing about the inheritance, has come to loath Maggie, whom he blames for Skipper’s death, and refuses to sleep with her. Only Big Daddy’s love of Brick and hatred of Gooper are in their favour, but Maggie fears their childlessness plus Brick’s degraded existence may compromise that advantage and result in her being cast back into oblivion.
Maggie is one of the great roles in American drama, but Cynthia Dale is simply not up to the task. The long first act which is almost a monologue in front of the taciturn Brick requires a tour de force of acting. Confronted with her husband’s hatred, Maggie tries every ploy possible from seduction and cajoling to ranting and insult to get Brick’s attention to try to win back his love. Her increasing fear, pain and desperation have to be clear no matter what ploy she tries or how composed she appears. Dale’s performance is too mannered and brittle from the start. She seems to be imitating a Williams character rather than playing one. She does display a range of emotions but does not show the simultaneous presence of conflicting emotions on which the role is built. The part is just too large for her to inhabit naturally, much less fully.
As Brick, David Snelgrove has the same problem. Brick is silently waging his own inner battle between his love for Skipper and his own virulent homophobia. This is all the more surprising since neither Maggie nor even Big Daddy is homophobic. Big Daddy, in fact, inherited the plantation from known gay couple who used to sleep in the very bed in Brick and Maggie’s bedroom. Though playing someone who drinks without pause throughout the play, Snelgrove is unable to show the gradations in Brick’s drunkenness. Nor does he show gradations in his reactions to Maggie or to Big Daddy. We have no glimpse of how Brick and Maggie could ever have gotten together let alone have been “blissfully happy” together as they claim.
As Big Daddy and Big Mama, James Blendick and Lally Cadeau take their characters to the brink of caricature but luckily pull back. Blendick first makes Big Daddy appear much larger than life but quickly sets about to humanize him. In the crucial Act 2 confrontation between father and son, Blendick shows both Big Daddy’s pain at not being able to communicate with Brick and the habits in his own nature that prevent communication from happening. In his exulting in what he believes is a reprieve from death, he expresses a hubris linking his character to the great figures of ancient tragedy.
Cadeau plays Big Mama as a woman inured to self-deception. Her husband’s repeated public insults she construes as affection, though Cadeau lets us glimpse the fact that Big Mama is consciously hiding her pain. The same is true for how Cadeau portrays Big Mama’s efforts to believe Big Daddy is well. Like so many of Williams’ women, Big Mama uses various ruses to keep the harshness of reality at bay, though never with complete success.
Thom Marriott and Brigit Wilson are well cast as the grasping, hypocritical Gooper and Mae as are Robert King and Steve Cumyn as the professionally useless Reverend Tooker and Doctor Baugh.
In his programme notes director Richard Monette claims that Williams as a playwright is “non-naturalistic”. That is certainly true of some plays like “Camino Real” but not of this one where all the action is set in a single room and where stage time equals real time. Playwrights from Strindberg in his “Miss Julie” onwards have used this technique to set up a pressure-cooker atmosphere in which the characters are trapped. Monette’s frequent ploy of having actors step into a spotlight at the front of the stage to address the audience for some of their longer speeches destroys this carefully constructed atmosphere and its purpose. Monette claims that in doing this he is bringing out the play’s likeness to Greek tragedy. He forgets that the great innovation in Greek tragedy was Aeschylus’ addition of a second actor so that one individual could be seen to speak to another. None of speeches Monette highlights are soliloquies, so to cut out the reactions of the second actor plunged in darkness not only goes against Williams but is also not Greek.
Lorenzo Savoini’s set, in fact, does more to relate the play to Greek tragedy than Monette’s mistaken direction. The enormous central shuttered door recalls the large central door of ancient theatres and his omission of the room’s walls, while non-naturalistic, reinforces the lack of privacy anyone has in the mansion. Steve Hawkins’ lighting constantly heightens the mood and helps create the tension of the simultaneous inner and outer storms that are brewing throughout the action. Dana Osborne’s costumes capture the period but her two-tone orange maternity set for Mae suggests more that Mae is colour-blind than that she has bad taste.
One of the reasons Tennessee Williams’ plays have stood the test of time is because he was able to create characters of such complexity. This production has a fine Big Daddy and Big Mama who do full justice to their roles. It’s a pity that Stratford could not find a Brick and Maggie to do so as well.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: David Snelgrove and Cynthia Dale. ©David Hou.
2005-06-30
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof