Review Roundup: CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF at Almeida Theatre

Following her Olivier Award-winning production of A Streetcar Named Desire, Almeida Associate Director Rebecca Frecknall directs BAFTA nominee Kingsley Ben-Adir and Golden Globe nominee Daisy Edgar-Jones in Tennessee Williams' Pulitzer Prize-winning play.

I'm not living with you. We occupy the same cage. The Pollitt family gathers to celebrate a birthday, but behind the smiles is a family in crisis. With Brick and Maggie's marriage plagued by secrets and deceit, the question of legacy lingers. As the family confront the impending death of their patriarch, a war of truth and lies is waged.  

The full cast includes Kingsley Ben-Adir, Guy Burgess, Clare Burt, Seb Carrington, Daisy Edgar-Jones, Derek Hagen, Lennie James, Ukweli Roach and Ria Zmitrowicz.   Presented in association with Chris Harper Productions. By special arrangement with The University of the South, Sewanee, Tennessee.    

See what the critics are saying...

Gary Naylor, BroadwayWorld: Maybe it’s the carol singers in Upper Street or the Christmas lights, but such intensity across three hours is a stiff ask to maintain in the season of goodwill. Though analysis reveals a brilliantly written and skilfully executed drama, a synthesis suggests that the sum of those parts verges on the overwhelming, the aggregate of dysfunctionality testing one’s stamina even with an interval and a pause. Like a kale smoothie from one of the chi-chi bars of Islington, this Cat on a Hot Tin Roof does you good, but it can be a trial finishing those last few mouthfuls.   

Arifa Akbar, The Guardian: Frecknall’s production is full of stylishness as a whole but it does not plumb the emotional depths at the core of the play. It does switch gears in the second act, though, with the family’s face-offs over the terminal diagnosis of its alpha-patriarch, Big Daddy (who is the last to know he is dying), and the ensuing tussle for his inheritance.

Alice Saville, The Independent: Frecknall’s play runs long and slow at 180 minutes – and it feels unbalanced, too, with Maggie’s thin scenes outweighed by her husband’s bloated ones. If her previous stagings of Williams’s plays have centred on sisterhood, this is all about a booze-soaked brotherhood, one that’s mistakenly angry at women for wrongs they’ve done to themselves.

Holly O'Mahony, London Theatre: Performances are strong all round. Lennie James is a morbid but chummy Big Daddy, riddled with questions about his own marriage now his health is failing. Pearl Chanda’s Mae is suitably smug as the wife who has it all and is set on inheriting the family’s 28,000-acre plot of land. There are also some clever visual juxtapositions between upright son Gooper (a suited, eager-to-please Ukweli Roach) and Brick, who remains the golden boy despite spending the third act incapacitated on the floor.

Daz Gale, All That Dazzles: Frecknall’s vision for this production of Cat On A Hot Tin Roof allows each of the three acts to be distinct and markedly different from each other. Act one is a slow-burn and a predominant two-hander between Brick (Kingsley Ben_Adir) and Maggie (Daisy Edgar-Jones) with act two beginning as a more ensemble piece before a climactic showdown before father and son, only for the aftermath of this to play out in the closing act. It is the second act where this production is at its best in an explosive and mesmerising series of events that risked me forgetting to breathe, such was the magnitude of what I was witnessing. 

Andrzej Lukowski, Time Out: Not everyone is going to love Frecknall’s doomy reimagining of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, in which Big Daddy’s mansion is a house of trapped spirits. But amidst the gloom, there’s a glimmer – what makes Frecknall’s Tennessee Williams productions so powerful is that she always manages to find the goodness in his cracked characters, always makes us care about them. Maggie, Brick, even Big Daddy - there is still light in this infernal darkness, in these anything but normal people.

Claire Allfree, The Telegraph: Yet Frecknall’s production burns itself out by the end of the second act, leaving it with no where to go for its final 30 minutes. All the truths have been revealed, the wounds exposed, and what remains is simply the awful mess of it all. A pretty exhausted audience, too, truth be told. And two people who can’t give each other what they need lying together on the floor.