Cabaret’s Rebecca Frecknall directs another Tennessee Williams play at London’s Almeida Theatre.
Rebecca Frecknall has now completed a trilogy of Tennessee Williams revivals at the Almeida in north London that began back in 2018 with her piano-heavy take on Summer and Smoke, followed by a starry Streetcar Named Desire featuring Normal People‘s Paul Mescal (heading to New York next spring).
Mescal’s co-star Daisy Edgar-Jones now reunites with Frecknall for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (Frecknall was previously movement director when Edgar-Jones appeared in Albion at the same venue in early 2020, just before Normal People became a global sensation), with Edgar-Jones’s turn as Maggie the Cat perhaps the biggest draw for the general public.
She certainly acquits herself well in Frecknall’s three-hour trek through Williams’s tale of the woe-ridden Pollitt family, all of whom are reuniting for patriarch Big Daddy’s 65th birthday. Maggie’s mangled eccentricities, her sugar-rush joie-de-vivre in the face of unquenchable sadness, allow Edgar-Jones to break out of the stoic, quiet mold that Normal People initially placed her in, and Hollywood has far too frequently kept her displaying ever since, with appearances in films like Where the Crawdads Sing. You can sense her joy in being able to loosen a few more screws, prowling across the grand piano on Chloe Lamford’s sparse set.
Maggie’s main moments to shine come during a dense, wordy, and repetitive first act of Williams’s three-part play, which amounts to a triptych of dysfunction, disillusion, and self-interest. As the evening progresses, an increasingly drunk Brick, that Maggie’s husband and Big Daddy’s favorite son played by an understated Kingsley Ben-Adir, is forced to confront the realities of his past, his failing marriage, and his increasing reliance on alcohol in order to find the point at which he can “click”, and find some release.
The glue holding the evening together, however, is Lennie James as Big Daddy. Buoyed by the revelation of a medical all-clear, James unleashes unfiltered frustrations on everyone in his path — a runaway truck of brutal honesty. His moments with Ben-Adir, in the show’s central act, are the most riveting.
As she displayed with Cabaret (and will do again when A Streetcar Named Desire comes to New York), Frecknall revels in theater’s ability to make the tangible intangible, and make the intangible tangible. Here, Big Daddy’s vast wealth is stripped back to a silver paneled wall, a cluster of nondescript chairs and the Almeida’s trademark brick panelling. Visual strokes come through Lee Curran’s magnificent, slippery lighting.
The greatest addition is the spectral presence of Brick’s great love, his friend Skipper. Physically on stage throughout, playing the grand piano for large passages of the text with a spectral discord, he allows Frecknall to swill together the present and the past for characters who have no sense of a future.
It’s not as dynamite as A Streetcar Named Desire, and not as conceptually assured as Frecknall’s magnificent Summer and Smoke. Nevertheless, it’s a decent attempt at a play full of linguistic booby traps.