Reviews 2011
Reviews 2011
✭✭✭✭✭
by Tennessee Williams, directed by Eda Holmes
Shaw Festival, Royal George Theatre, Niagara-on-the-Lake
May 26-October 23, 2011
“Sizzling”
The Shaw Festival is already renowned for the uniformly high level of its productions, but sometimes a production comes together with such unity and force that it is more than just excellent but thrilling. This is the case with the Festival’s first-ever production of Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof staged to honour the 100th anniversary of Williams’ birth. The show is not merely hot but scorching.
Under the direction of Eda Holmes the entire cast gives performances of breathtaking intensity. Moya O’Connell begins the evening with the act-long near-monologue of Maggie, the cat of the title, whose goal is to stay on the hot tin roof she’s climbed up to for as long as she can. She married Brick Pollitt when he was a football star and now must cope with his withdrawal into alcoholism following the death of his best friend Skipper. When she escapes the party for the 65th birthday of Brick’s father, Big Daddy, she returns to the bed-sitting room where Brick has been holed up all day and reveals the kind of witty, vivacious woman she is through her humorous criticism of the family of Brick’s brother Gooper. Soon enough she realizes that Brick is not listening and O’Connell shows how that makes Maggie almost visibly shrink into herself like a freed spirit facing return to confinement or a prisoner led back to torture.
With complete naturalness O’Connell conveys Maggie’s complex mixture of love for Brick with anger, disappointment, resentment, pity and self-pity at Brick’s indifference. Her praise, taunts and pleading in lesser hands can seem like ploys to wrest some response from him, but with O’Connell Maggie’s varied attempts to communicate are all coloured with a sense of hope against hopelessness, with a sense that she can somehow breathe life again into a man bent on self-destruction. The greatest sign of hope in this act, as in Big Daddy’s conversation with Brick in Act 2, is that both she and Big Daddy continue to speak to Brick, as to a man in a coma, in spite of the seeming futility of ever breaking through the wall of impassivity Brick has built to protect himself.
The focus of Act 2 is Big Daddy’s confrontation with Brick. Jim Mezon’s Big Daddy bursts on the scene like an erupting volcano. Hurling a torrent of cruel insults at his befuddled wife and at Gooper’s family and their hypocritical sentimentalizing of his birthday, he clears the room to speak to his younger but favourite son to find out the truth of what is wrong. His proclivity to vulgarity, blanket condemnations and self-aggrandizement nearly sabotage his efforts. But beneath all the bombast Mezon shows Big Daddy has a real love for Brick and desires to communicate it even if he does know how to do it. Only when he finds they have a common enemy in Gooper and his wife Mae, does Big Daddy find way in to Brick’s secret. Gooper and Mae have claimed that Brick and Maggie have no children because Brick refuses to sleep with her and that he has begun drinking after Skipper’s death because the two had a homosexual relationship. Pig-headed as Big Daddy may seem, Mezon shows that the man does have knowledge about how people behave and that Brick has likely been punishing Maggie in order to punish himself for his own guilt.
Gray Powell’s Brick drinks to become numb. As he says, he waits for “The click I get in my head when I've had enough of this stuff to make me peaceful”. Powell makes Brick seem like someone who hasn’t slept for days and who speaks as if completely detached from what he is saying. He’s broken his ankle trying to leap hurdles as he used to do in high school. Now his cast is a sign of his failure and the need for a crutch. Brick thinks the crutch he needs is alcohol. When Maggie tries to help him walk he rejects her, but Holmes insightful direction focusses on Brick’s gradual realization after his confrontation with Big Daddy that Maggie is the crutch he really needs to move forward. Powell shows us that beneath all of Brick’s sullen irritability, rampant self-hatred is seething that alcohol can numb but never exorcise.
The fourth major player is Corinne Koslo as Brick’s mother, Big Mama. Koslo’s petite stature works in this role since it makes Big Daddy’s continual insults seems even more cruel and unfair. Koslo makes us cringe with pity as Big Mama tries to rationalize Bid Daddy’s hateful attitude toward her as his way of showing love. She makes us see that all Big Mama wants are the traditional comforts of family life--children, celebrations, harmony--but Brick reviles that as “mendacity” and Big Daddy as hypocrisy. Despite her capacity for self-deception, Koslo makes clear that his woman is not the fool her husband thinks her. When Gooper shows her the papers he rather to readily has drawn up to give him control of Big Daddy’s fortune, she sees immediately the what he’s up to.
As the scheming Mae, Nicole Underhay gives a wonderfully wicked portrait of coarseness. The forced dulcet tones she uses when others are about vanish as soon as she is alone with Maggie and can flaunt her fertility in the face of Maggie’s childlessness. She seems to be the one who pushes her husband Gooper into action, since, as Patrick McManus plays him, Gooper is otherwise so reticent and spineless.
Brick says that he and Maggie merely share the same cage and designer Sue LePage has created a set with its huge shuttered doors that when lit by Kevin Lamotte often looks like an enormous cage. The verandah on two sides of the corner room gives a hint of the nearly complete lack of privacy Maggie and Brick suffer in Big Daddy’s house and helps explain why a retreat inwards is Brick’s only real option for escape. As an outward expression of its owner, the room also looks decrepit with paint barely covering the wood. Lepage’s costumes both suit the period and highlight the inherent beauty of Maggie, the prim dowdiness of Mae and the vain ostentation of Big Mama.
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is so often revived as a star vehicle that it is refreshing and enlightening to see it performed as an ensemble piece. The main characters may have their principal turns, but they recede when others take the floor. The result is a more cohesive presentation of the play. When Stratford presented the play in 2005, the focus was the war between two sides of the family for Big Daddy’s fortune. This is a superficial view since it’s clear early on that both Big Daddy and Big Mama see through the posturing of Gooper and Mae. Holmes highlights the more essential point that Brick and Big Daddy unlock the deliberately hidden self-knowledge in the other--of guilt in Brick, of approaching death in Big Daddy--and that only such knowledge can cut through the world’s stifling mendacity.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Gray Powell and Moya O’Connell. ©2011 Emily Cooper.
For tickets, visit www.shawfest.com.
2011-08-09
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof