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“Give me my crutch!” hollers Kingsley Ben-Adir’s Brick at one point in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. He’s referring to the physical support he has needed since breaking his ankle in a mysterious 3am accident. But he could also be talking about the liquor that is just about getting him through the day, while rotting his mind and destroying his body. Indeed, everyone in Tennessee Williams’s searingly unhappy 1955 play is hobbling along on a crutch — the main one being mendacity — as Brick pointedly observes. Brick’s wife Maggie, the titular feline and played here with panther-like stealth and ferocity by Daisy Edgar-Jones, is just about clinging on.
That mendacity comes over loud and clear in Rebecca Frecknall’s bruising, claustrophobic production, in which bad faith seems to hang in the air like mist, pooling in the corners of Chloe Lamford’s coldly opulent set. The latest of Frecknall’s Williams stagings (her superlative Streetcar is about to open in the West End), it hums with tension and seethes with despair, drawing a link between Williams’s miserable rich family and the feuding dynasty in Succession.
The family has gathered for Big Daddy’s birthday, but the festivities are undercut by mutual loathing — Brick and Maggie despise Brick’s grasping brother Gooper and his wife Mae — and by the fact that everyone except Big Daddy knows he is dying of cancer. An ugly tussle for his huge estate rumbles in the background, with Gooper (Ukweli Roach) and Mae (Pearl Chanda) asserting their sobriety and their growing brood of children, in contrast to Brick’s dissolute state and lack of issue.
Thwarted desire — for money, for sex, for love — can make people ugly and this is possibly Williams’s bitterest play: grim as a Greek tragedy, soaked in trapped sadness. The first act is heavy going, with Edgar-Jones’s desperate Maggie hurling herself again and again at the brick wall of her husband’s indifference. Frecknall pitches this encounter high and brittle from the outset, which makes it all the harder to watch. Her staging comes into its own, however, in the confrontation between Brick and Big Daddy, as they edge closer to the truth about themselves.
Lennie James is wonderfully complex as the tough patriarch, brutal and misogynistic about his wife, savage about his cloying family, yet tender in his concern for his lost son, in whose disgust with society he sees some reflection of himself. Ben-Adir meanwhile gives a stonking performance as Brick, bringing brilliantly precise physicality to his character’s increasing intoxication and quietly scoping out the wretched self-loathing that is driving him to the bottle. Skipper (Seb Carrington), the young man whom Brick clearly loved but broke with rejection, haunts the action, jangling Brick’s memory with chords on a grand piano or slumping in the corner.
In the end, Frecknall’s staging steers through all the noise to something far more sad than angry: an image of a woman high on hope, bent over her near-comatose husband — two unbearably lonely people trapped in a dishonest society.
★★★★☆
To February 1, almeida.co.uk