The week in theatre: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof; The Little Foxes; The Invention of Love – review
It is fascinating, Rebecca Frecknall’s fascination with Tennessee Williams. Over the past six years she has systematically unpicked the plays, making audiences at the Almeida reconsider an established dramatist. In 2018, she directed a revelatory, stripped-back interpretation of the little-known Summer and Smoke. Five years later she took the stage by storm with her production of A Streetcar Named Desire, fired up by the dynamic casting of Patsy Ferran and Paul Mescal. In tackling Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Frecknall has cast Daisy Edgar-Jones, Mescal’s co-star in TV’s Normal People, as Maggie, the candid and frustrated woman who styles herself “the cat”, and infused the evening with her customary mixture of drama and dream.
“Mendacity” is the word that rings through the evening. But it would be lying to say fibs alone are Williams’s subject. True, the plot is a web of concealment – and where better to explore this than the theatre, which is make-believe. An elderly man is not told he is dying from cancer; his son cannot admit to his love for another man; wives hide from themselves the knowledge of their husbands’ contempt. Still the drama’s particular force comes from exploring the impulses behind the lies.
Against the unsparing brightness of Chloe Lamford’s design of gilded tiles, everyone is exposed. Kingsley Ben-Adir is particularly powerful – sullen and somnolent, moving as if he were dragging a dead weight – as Brick, the alcoholic who rejects his wife and hides from his emotions; while Williams was writing the play in 1954, he was experiencing “a sort of insulation about my feelings”, and was increasingly addicted to “a little drinky-pie”. Pearl Chanda emits exactly the right gleam as an avid daughter-in-law. Edgar-Jones – lithe and bold – confidently carries off the tremendous feat of a first act dedicated to her snarling non-stop at her almost entirely unresponsive husband, though her portrayal would gain another inflection from a suggestion that some of her rage has escaped into speech against her will.
It is not only Williams’s eloquence that makes his plays so extraordinary: they simmer with the unsayable and the unsaid
Although it is Maggie who calls herself the cat, all the characters could apply the title (which Williams took from an expression of his father’s) to themselves. Nearly everyone – including a silent, piano-playing observer, who may be Brick’s lost, loved friend – takes a turn at doing cat stretches on top of the piano. Slow-motion dance movement is another regular feature of Frecknall’s productions; its wooziness chimes with the way characters swim in and out of full consciousness. In the end, it is not only Williams’s eloquence that makes his plays so extraordinary: they simmer with the unsayable and the unsaid.
Director Lyndsey Turner has so often announced her interpretation with a mighty visual statement. Who could forget the grey cage of Irish rain that encased her production of Faith Healer? Yet the scenic might is beginning to look like bullying. In September, Turner staged a Coriolanus at the National in which monumental spectacle overwhelmed Shakespeare. In The Little Foxes, the design by Lizzie Clachan is at war with Lillian Hellman’s play.
Set in Alabama in 1900, first seen with Tallulah Bankhead on Broadway in 1939 and later filmed with Bette Davis, the plot centres on the bitter power struggle between venal siblings scrabbling to get rich from the construction of a cotton mill. The ethos may endure but the characters’ presentation and attitudes are turn-of-the-century. Brutish men are unashamedly swaggering. The women struggle to keep afloat. An aristocratic wife, feebly slapped here, is driven to drink and twittering: Anna Madeley, one of the acting talents who have made All Creatures Great and Small enticing, unravels with delicate conviction. Anne-Marie Duff, never boring, shows her ability to turn in a second from looking like a weapon to seeming utterly besieged. Here – all in scarlet – she also marvellously summons up Bette D, by the set of her shoulders and tilt of her head.
The trouble is that though there is no updating of dialogue, which refers to horse-drawn carriages and post-civil war arrangements, Clachan’s design – beige, hard-edged – evokes the mid-20th century. It is all function and no flounce. Set amid this, with melodramatic lighting from Lucy Carter, Hellman’s play appears histrionic. As if the little foxes were straining to be wolves.
Simon Russell Beale is the reason to see the revival of Tom Stoppard’s 1997 play The Invention of Love. He is the 77-year-old AE Housman, now dead, looking back on his divided life, as he is ferried across the Styx by Alan Williams’s impressive Charon (“I had that Dionysus in the back of my boat,” he says – a joke reprised in Shakespeare in Love). Beale glimmers as if he indeed had a toe in the afterlife. He flicks by an almost imperceptible movement from humour to melancholy: he seems to carry around his own internal lighting rig.
Yet the play itself, though directed by Blanche McIntyre, herself a classicist, largely shrivels on the stage. Intriguing ideas are floated without propulsion: Housman the poet versus Housman the Latin scholar; love as a subject for academic study versus love as a torment for Housman, seen cheering on the heartily heterosexual Moses Jackson (Ben Lloyd-Hughes has to do a lot of running around in shorts); love that seeks to invent a new style – Dickie Beau is a dainty Oscar Wilde – is also a source of invention. Far too much of the dialogue is given over to caricature celebrity dons: dropping epithets, hitting croquet balls, chortling.
Star ratings (out of five)
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof ★★★★
The Little Foxes ★★★
The Invention of Love ★★
• Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is at the Almeida, London, until 1 February 2025
• The Little Foxes is at the Young Vic, London, until 8 February 2025
• The Invention of Love is at the Hampstead theatre, London, until 1 February 2025
