Performance
Review: ATC's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
By Jay Bennie
13th July 2008 - 12:14 pm

Toni Potter & Gareth Reeves as Maggie & Brick

Poor, sad, old Brick. In Tennessee Williams' classic story of repressed homosexuality, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, faded football hero Brick cannot bring himself to acknowledge what those with in his family with half a brain or an ounce of interest can sense.

Brick is drinking himself into oblivion as he pines for the one true love of his life, his college chum Skipper who drank himself to death, all the while denying the truth behind their unconsummated bond.

Williams buries this personal tension beneath layers of family infighting, greed and "mendacity." Everyone is lying, hiding, manipulating, yet no one can face up to their deceits. As the play progresses Williams peels back those layers of deceit, exposing the corrupted humanity at the core.

In the Auckland Theatre Company production of Cat, which opened this weekend, two of the four characters on whom the story depends were spot on and two seemed to miss by the merest whisker, sabotaged by ill-advised changes in time and place.

Stuart Devenie & Alison Quigan as Big Daddy & Big Momma

Colin McColl's direction is, as ever, sure and 'real', particularly the physical aspects of Brick's drinking and Maggie's determination to bed her impotent husband and thus secure their financial future via inheritance. Toni Potter moves over the set like a moggie on heat, sensuous and seductive, unabashed in her physicality and knowingly manipulative. This is a performance subtly underlined by desperation and delusion which transcends the often shrewish interpretations of Maggie, and it's a stunner.

If the first act hangs off Potter's tour de force performance, the second act is all Stuart Devenie's. As the cancer-ridden patriarch Big Daddy, who takes pride in his business achievements but fears they will be squandered by the next generation, and who sees his son's difficulties more clearly than anyone, Devenie manages to be at once boorish, caring, insightful, manipulative and complex to the point that he becomes the character we most readily empathise with. He's driven and selfish, yet his fully functioning bullshit detector means he at least understands the essential difference between honesty and "mendacity." Devenie makes the bullying old bastard likable, or at least understandable, and has created a piece of theatre magic.

For some reason the ATC chose to drag Cat on a Hot Tin Roof out of the 1950s into the present day and in this change lies the production's main problem. Brick may be surrounded by cellphones and inflation-adjusted fortunes, but he is still a figure of the '50s. His self-loathing and self-denial, and the attitudes of those around him, do not sit well in the present day, even in the southern USA. Brick's anguish in the post-gay pride era of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, Elton John, Ellen DeGeneris, et al, feels dated. He is trapped in a 1950s time warp that just isn't real for the present day setting. We can't identify with him.

Gareth Reeves & Toni Potter as Brick & Maggie

Williams, a gay man, wrote Brick to be defeated by his situation, drowning in a sea of ignorance, societal pressure and booze. Instead, despite a more than competent portrayal by Gareth Reeves, in this production Brick veers too much towards being merely self-indulgent, weak and fatally insulated from reality.

Alison Quigan, as Big Momma, is similarly sabotaged, by a cool, sleek hotel suite setting that reeks of air conditioning. Yet she is required to sweatily bustle around the stage, fanning herself with her handkerchief, doing all the bits of business that hark back to Williams' original humid southern mansion setting with its fin de siecle evocation of mildew and stifling moral decay. Quigan works hard but the odds are stacked against her as she waddles and fluffs her way through a sea of glittering clear plastic and sterile white vinyl.

Although Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is still a powerful piece of theatre, and this production will no doubt appeal to most theatre-goers, gays and lesbians in the ATC's audience are more likely to observe Brick's anguish and the machinations of those around him with bemusement, merely wishing that these folks watched a little more CNN or Oprah.


Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
By Tennessee Williams
Auckland Theatre Company
Director: Colin McColl
Starring: Gareth Reeves, Toni Potter, Stuart Devenie, Alison Quigan
Maidment Theatre, until 2 August.


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